


For Brothers

by cleasugar



Category: Four Brothers (2005), Supernatural
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider, Past Child Abuse, Slash, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-04 23:51:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 26,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6680956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleasugar/pseuds/cleasugar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was at least a 12 hour drive from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Kermit, Texas and Dean wasn't in a rush to get where he was going. The only thing he had to look forward to at the end of this trip was a righteously pissed off little brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Bobby

**Author's Note:**

> Torn and Frayed Fixit, no wincest. First fanfiction I ever wrote -- originally published at fanfiction.net.

Bobby Mercer stomped up the porch steps and pulled open the screen door with a jerk. Angel!” he yelled. He almost let the door slam shut behind him, but instinct, in the form of his ma’s voice, kicked in. “Bobby don’t you slam that door!” -- he could hear the words like she was standing right there at the top of the stairs looking down at him, frowning and smiling in the same expression, as if she was completely exasperated with him and really glad he was home all at the same time.  He stuck his hand out and caught the swinging door at the last minute, letting it snick gently shut. “Angel! Sophie!” he shouted up the empty stair case. “Loco Ono!” That last would usually get a screech of protest from his brother’s crazy-ass woman, but the house was quiet. 

Bobby huffed, his breath showing in the cold air, and walked towards the kitchen in search of beer. And maybe food. but definitely beer. God he needed a fucking drink.  Or a joint.  Or both. Problem was, since Angel joined up he’d also cleaned up--the military was picky about its drug tests-- so it wasn’t like Bobby could raid his brother’s stash. And Jerry, mister responsibility I’ve got a wife and two fucking adorable little girls (well, Bobby adored them), he’d never had a stash worth raiding in the first place. So the joint was out, unless he wanted to go digging through Jacky’s room, which he just…didn’t. And the beer--he glanced at the label--the beer was some weak-ass non alcoholic low carb _crap_. What. The. Fuck. Sophie must be on a diet again. Who the fuck let her buy the beer? Bobby glanced sourly back through the kitchen into the living room, aware of but refusing to acknowledge the preternatural silence in the house. And that’s when he saw the note.

It was Angel’s scrawl, on a piece of paper that had obviously been taped to the mirror by the door, but had fallen down under the side table so Bobby hadn’t seen it when he’d come in. Frowning, he stalked over to pick it up. 

Bobby--  
We’re with Sophie’s sister.  
555.436.9366

Call.

The last word was underlined, twice.

Bobby sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face before glancing up and catching sight of his reflection in the mirror.  He saw the weight of the last six months in the tense shoulders, the downturned mouth. And he saw the grief that never seemed to leave his bleak, angry eyes. Bobby couldn’t look at his own face in a mirror without seeing the face of his little brother, his Jacky, blood filling his mouth as he cried for his big brother to help him.  And the face of his Ma, looking so worried and sad. God he hated thinking about that look on Ma’s face. Bobby Mercer wasn’t anybody’s idea of a perfect son but he’d do anything for his Ma and when she was unhappy, well nothing was right with the world.

His Ma sad and worried. His Jacky scared and hurt. Sometimes Bobby wanted to poke his own eyes out to get the images of their faces out of his head. But somehow, he didn’t think it would be that easy. Getting blind drunk was another option.  He looked down at the fake beer in his hand. Well, apparently not tonight.  He grunted, smoothing out Angel’s note with chilled fingers, and picked up the phone on the table to make the damn call. The cold made his breath fog over his reflection in the mirror. He could have turned on the heat, but outside it was the middle of fucking July, in the middle of the hottest fucking summer on record in the Motor City. 


	2. Dean Drives

It was at least a twelve hour drive from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Kermit, Texas and Dean wasn’t in a rush to get where he was going. Sam might have made the trip in record time, but he was motivated by the fake 911 call from his pretty little bit of normal life. The only thing Dean had to look forward to at the end of this trip was a righteously pissed off little brother who wouldn’t be in the mood to listen to what his big brother had to say. And yeah, okay, faking the distress call from the girl to get Sam out of the way during the hunt was a pretty shitty move, but Dean had been a little desperate. Sam and Benny had been on a collision course and no way that was gonna end well. 

Benny thought Dean was protecting his baby brother, sending him off on a wild goose chase, but it was the other way around. Sam could be a giant emo girl but he was also the deadliest hunter on the planet, present company included. If there was one thing a year in Purgatory taught Dean, it was how to assess a threat. Dean weighed Benny’s over-confidence, fueled by his hundred-year stint in the land of Mortal Kombat, against Sam’s simmering angst and took the logical step. Benny was cocky, but Sam was motivated. So Dean got him out of the picture, because when it came right down to it, if Sam went after Benny the vampire would be ended because there was no fucking way Dean was going ever going to take a swing at his little brother. And no fucking way he’d ever put Sammy in a position where he’d have to take a swing at Dean.

The Texas landscape rolled by as Dean drove, the feel of the road under his Baby’s wheels relaxing him like few other things could.  Things weren’t good between him and Sam, and Dean hated that.  He knew Sam did too, and he wondered how they were going to get past this. There was a time when he could have told Sam to trust Benny and Sam would have followed his lead because that’s what he did--trusted his big brother.  Even now Dean guessed that there was a better-than-average chance that Sam would have left Benny’s head attached to his shoulders just because Dean asked it and as long as Benny didn’t do something abysmally stupid like bite somebody.  But better than average was not a sure thing, and Dean found he didn’t want to put it to the test because there was a real chance he might fail. He didn’t want proof that Sammy’s trust in him had limits.

So he’d sent Sam away. And now he had to face the music. Speaking of…Dean groped around in the battered box of tapes sitting in the  seat that ought to have had Sam’s big butt parked in it, and grabbed one at random.  Power chords poured out the open window as the Impala roared through the shimmering heat of the Texan summer.


	3. Dean Listens

It wasn’t hard to find him, when Dean finally got into town. Following the pattern that they used when they became separated, Sam was holed up in  the first no tell motel in the phone book. That told Dean two things: Sam wasn’t running, he was making a stand. And Dean was expected.  It gave him a little clench of something like hope in his chest, and he wondered as he pulled into the motel lot if Sam would hear the Impala’s engines and come to look, or if he’d wait in his room like the stubborn cuss he was until Dean knocked on the door. Dean was betting on the latter.

As he got out of the car though, he revised his opinion that Sam would have heard him arrive, because there was  yelling coming from the room third down from the end.  Dean didn’t recognize the voice doing most of the shouting--it was female, high and angry-- but he recognized the low timbre of his brother’s, using his “let’s just keep calm” tone, although Dean couldn’t make out any actual words. Then the door jerked open and a teary woman stalked out, saying “No, Sam, just no. I can’t do this. Why did you even come back? What did you think would happen?” and Dean got his first look at little miss normal life Amelia Richardson. She was pretty even when she was angry and crying, her curling black hair flying loose from where she had tied it back. She looked small against Sam’s bulk as he came to the door after her. Small, but made of steel. Sam’s face was turned the other way, but Dean didn’t need to see it to know that Sam looked hurt and guilty. Another person’s life fucked up just because they got close to a Winchester. 

Sam stood watching as Amelia walked away in the opposite direction without looking back, his shoulders slumped a bit. Dean thought he looked tired and sad. But then, Sam had looked nothing but tired and sad for the last couple years. They both had. It was their default state of existence, and Dean suddenly wondered when that started being okay. When was the last time either of them had felt like smiling just because life was good? It’d been years.

Well not for Sam, Dean thought, his always-simmering resentment bubbling up again. Maybe just a few months for Sam. Sam who had a year of a normal life with a girl and a dog. There had probably been some smiling too. While Dean was battling it out in Purgatory, living in gore, Sam was playing house and _smiling_.

Dean took a deep breath and forced his thoughts off that topic. It wasn’t going to help fix what was wrong between him and his brother and Sam had already made it clear he’d had enough of Dean’s opinions on how Sam had spent his year-long summer vacation. They had to get past it, which meant that Dean had to drop it, bury the hurt. He straightened up from where he’d been leaning against the car, watching Sam’s little family drama, and started walking towards his brother, willing him to turn around and look his way. But instead, Sam’s phone rang.

Dean’s hands automatically went to his phone in his jacket pocket, because who would be calling Sam but him? Sam seemed to think so too, since he was letting it ring without looking at it, the set of his shoulders and back suddenly tense like he was prepping for a fight. Something in Dean ached to see it. A call from a brother should always be welcome.  
When Sam took out his phone and looked at the caller id, though, his manner changed. He relaxed, running his hand through his over-long hair, and Dean was close enough to hear the warmth in his brother’s voice when he said just about the last thing Dean was expecting to hear.

“Hey, Bobby.”


	4. Dean Knocks

Dean stopped in shock, thinking _What the hell?_ as Sam leant against the frame of the open door to his room, still looking  towards the end of the parking lot where Angry Amelia had disappeared.

“You need some help?”  
…  
“Can do. Where are you?”  
…

“No, I can’t come now, I’m waiting on someone and I’m not sure how long he’ll be.”

The hope thing spiked in his chest again as Dean realized a couple of things in quick succession: That “Bobby” was another hunter--one he didn’t know. That Sam couldn’t have given up hunting completely over the year Dean had been in Purgatory, because otherwise how would Sam know a hunter he didn’t? That  the fact Dean had thought, seriously, even for a second, that Sam was talking to _their_ Bobby only proved how fucked up their lives were. And most importantly, that Sam was waiting on him.

He had a chance here to start fixing things between them and he wasn’t going to blow it.

“I’m in Texas,”  Sam was saying, and then he laughed. “Yeah, that doesn’t narrow it down. I’m in Kermit, it’s only about four hours from you. Can you come to me?”  
…

“Even if he shows, I’ll still wait on you.” Sam rattled off the name of the motel and his room number, and Dean tried to ignore the “if” in Sam’s one-sided conversation.

Sam turned and went back into his room without seeing Dean standing there at the end of the row of doors. Or maybe he had. With Sam it was hard to tell. People kidded him about his puppy dog eyes but Sam had a helluva poker face, and when he didn’t want you to know what he was thinking, well it was easier to read Enochian than the stony look in Sammy’s eyes. It would have made Dean proud if lately it hadn’t been directed at him. Once again he wondered how they had both got to the point where they felt the need to protect themselves from each other.

Dean gave Sam a few minutes to get settled in and then, taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and knocked.


	5. Dean Waits

Well, that went well. Not. Despite Dean’s resolution to make nice with his big and angry little brother, the resentment and betrayal he kept trying to push down must have showed, because the moment Sam saw him standing outside the door, he almost slammed it in Dean’s face.  Sam was wearing self righteous bitch face number 23 like body armor, and it pushed all of Dean’s buttons. He threw his apology at Sam like a challenge, pissed off all over again that Sam wouldn’t listen to what he had to say, and even more pissed off that Sam didn’t trust him implicitly, even about Benny. And even more pissed off still that Sam was going on about weepy Amelia Richardson--the woman who was worth more to Sam than trying to get his only brother out of Purgatory. And okay, things had degenerated from there, until Dean lost his temper at Sam’s damn good impersonation of an immovable rock and left, muttering about having made the long drive for nothing.

So much for not blowing it.

Dean still didn’t understand how things got so bad, so fast. When it came right down to it, he was still expecting Sam’s older brother hero-worship reflex to kick in -- the thing that had made the kid seek out Dean’s approval his entire life. It bothered Dean more than he could put into words that Sam might have finally outgrown his need for his big brother. Worse still, it bothered him that at this moment, Sam’s relationship with Dean might look more like the one he’d had with their Dad. Sammy wasn’t one to give ground if he thought he was in the right, and the end of the last fight with Dad had been Sammy walking out the door and out of their lives for four years. He’d left his family rather than give in. He’d left _Dean_.

It made Dean, sitting in the Impala glaring at the motel lot, angry all over again. God damn Sam for always walking away. For not trying harder. For not putting Dean first. Dean would have been out of town and half way to Rufus’s cabin by now if it weren’t for one thing. He wanted to get a good look at this “Bobby.”

And yeah, okay. Dean was angry, resentful, bitter, hurt, and betrayed. So maybe he ought to add jealous to that list of stellar character qualities. Because who ever “Bobby” was, Sam had been glad to hear from him. Whoever he was, he’d made Sam _laugh_ right when Dean had been thinking about how neither of them remembered how to smile. Dean drummed his fingers on the dash and tried to tell himself that he was just looking out for his kid brother. He’d make sure “Bobby” wasn’t a threat, and then he’d been on his way. But even Dean’s high tolerance for his own personal bullshit had limits, and that line was well into the red setting on his crap-o-meter.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Dean had been flinging Benny’s name in Sam’s face for days, how he was a good guy (for a vampire), someone he trusted (even though he was a vampire), someone who had his back (like Sam hadn’t). It had come to a head in that miserable Missouri town when Dean had told Sam Benny was a better brother than Sam had ever been. And okay, he’d been under the influence of a malignant ghost at the time, but still, _in vino veritas_. You don’t forget crap like that.  Dean’s mind wandered back over the years to a younger Sam holding a gun on him while a mad shrink Frankenstein doctor ghost had dug out every stray insecure thought in his little brother’s noggin and poured it like acid over Dean’s soul. _Why can’t you think for yourself, Dean? I have a mind of my own…I’m not pathetic, like you!_   Yeah, Dean thought, suddenly weary. You don’t forget crap like that. And the Winchester brothers had never really learned to apologize like they meant it. They preferred to be forgiven without having to ask for it. Dean blamed his Dad for that.


	6. Dean Watches

The moon had risen and started to set, Dean had drunk two coffees, eaten half a microwaved burrito, cold, and taken a leak behind the dumpster on the back side of the motel before a battered Lincoln town car pulled in to the motel lot and parked itself right at the door to Sam’s room. The lot wasn’t well lit (hell, it wasn’t lit at all) but the light had stayed on in Sam’s room even at this late hour and it poured through the flimsy curtains across the window to light up the walkway. Besides, his stint in Purgatory had made Dean’s night vision sharp.

The man that got out of the car was short, stocky, and walked like a bulldog looking for a fight. He had dark hair just a bit too long pulled into a short pony tail at the back of his neck, and a face that would have been okay looking if it hadn’t also looked like it had met more than a few fists. “Middleweight” was Dean’s first thought, looking at the way the guy planted his feet on the ground like a Mack truck couldn’t mow him down. He had an alert air, and Dean wondered if he’d been spotted sitting across the street in the Impala, watching the motel. Maybe not, but Dean wouldn’t have bet money on it.

The car window was rolled down and the night air was still, so Dean clearly heard the knock of the man’s knuckles  on the motel room door. It opened right away, too fast for Sam to have even tried to look through the peep hole-- _dammit, Sammy,_ Dean thought, _you need to be more careful_. But maybe Sam had seen his visitor through the curtained window. Dean hadn’t seen his brother’s massive shadow cross the light, but Sam knew how to scope out the territory without giving himself away, and he’d never do something so ass-crack stupid as stand in a lighted window at night.

“Bobby, man, it’s good to see you.” Sam’s voice was soft, but still carried the same warmth he’d had on the phone.  “Sam.” The gruff voice was friendly, but also wary. “Can we get inside?” Sam opened the door wider to let the man in, and then, with a last glance out at the dark lot and the street beyond, shut the door on the night. And on Dean.

Bobby was holed up with Sam for about an hour and a half. Dean waited it out in the car. He didn’t think he could get close enough to the room to hear what they were talking about without being discovered, and besides, he drew the line at stalking his own brother like some fan girl. The night was quiet, even peaceful. The run down motel was on a road that had its heyday back before the Interstate loop had been built, but was now all but forgotten by people who preferred the bypass to the direct route through town. Dean was an expert on roads like this--these days every town of any size had them. The traffic went elsewhere, but the old motels and the diners and the bars stayed, catering to the kind of folks who preferred to stay off the radar and out of the range of the police speed traps.  Hanging out in his Baby on disused street on a quiet summer night, waiting for the right moment? Hell, that was practically church for Dean.

When Sam’s door finally opened Dean sat up. Bobby stepped out and then turned to look at Sam, who once again had followed his visitor to the door.  “Thanks, man.” The gruff voice still floated clearly across the night air. But then this Bobby did something odd, that had Dean narrowing his eyes. He placed a hand gently on Sam’s chest, just to the left of his heart, and said, “you ok?” Like he was worried. Like he _cared_. Dean gritted his teeth. Just how close were these two?

Sam’s right hand reached up and pressed Bobby’s against his chest, squeezing before letting go and Bobby’s hand dropped back down to his side. “I’m fine,” Sam said, and god it looked like he was in high chick-flick mode. Funny, Dean hadn’t thought this Bobby looked the type. “I’ll be fine,” he amended, looking out past Bobby into the night and right at Dean.

Busted.

Sam didn’t give any indication he’d seen his brother watching from across the street. He just looked back at Bobby who was saying something about returning the favor. “Glad to help,” Sam told him. And then, with another glance out into the dark, “Watch yourself out there.”

Sam went back in his room without looking back in Dean’s direction. The mysterious Bobby got back in his gas guzzler and pulled out of the lot. Dean followed.


	7. Dean and Bobby

The town car pulled into a lot in front of “O’Malley’s,” an Irish pub practically invisible sandwiched as it was between several seedy strip clubs.  Dean shook his head at the marquee for the one to the left of the bar, which didn’t seem to have a name but did have a sign announcing “6 pretty girls and 1 big fat ugly one.” None of the lots looked too full, but then it was the middle of the week. Dean bet the things would be hopping come the weekend. There was a military base not too far off. Dean wondered if O’Malley’s had a pool table--he could use the time to rustle up some cash.

Inside, the place was surprisingly quiet, not even a replay of a football game running on the television above the bar. There was a pool table, but no one was playing. There were darts, too. And ditto. Maybe a dozen people were in the bar, and they all looked like they were there to do some serious drinking. Dean didn’t even cause a whisper of interest when he came through the door. People were too focused on making themselves numb.

The man he followed, “Bobby,” was sitting at the bar, nursing  a glass of beer. He hadn’t looked up when Dean had come in, hadn’t even glanced in the mirror behind the bar. But Dean didn’t kid himself. The guy knew he was there. Dean hadn’t been operating in stealth mode and he wasn’t in the mood to be subtle. He strolled over to the bar and stood behind the guy, looking over his shoulder. Only then did Bobby raise his eyes to meet Dean’s in the mirror.  He grunted. “Let’s have this conversation somewhere a little more private,” he suggested, spinning on the barstool to face Dean, his back to the bar and the mirror behind it.

They found a booth at the back without any trouble--slow night-- and Dean flirted on automatic with the bar maid that came over to take their drink order. She appreciated the attention but Dean’s mind wasn’t really on it. She was the prettiest thing in the bar, but that wasn’t saying much. Besides, Dean had a feeling that when her shift was over, she’d be walking next door to start her second job. He hoped it was to the place on the right, not the left. That one looked a little cleaner.

“So,” said the man called Bobby, once the girl had set down their drinks. “You’re Dean.”

“I’m Dean,” he agreed. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Bobby Mercer.” He didn’t hold out his hand, but he tipped his glass in Dean’s direction. “I’m a friend of Sam’s.”

“Yeah?” said Dean, “Since when?”

“For about eight months.” Bobby took a drink and set down his glass. “Sam helped me out with a problem and we hit it off.” He looked up at Dean. “You weren’t around.”

Dean tensed, feeling his too-ready anger start to rise. “No, I wasn’t,” he said evenly. “I was busy.”

He had to give the man credit, Bobby didn’t even flinch. Dean knew he could come across as dangerous. He might-- _might_ \--not have been the spree killing psychopath whose face was blazoned across the news channels a couple years ago, but he knew it was a near thing. These days Dean lived practically steeped in blood.  Sometimes the smell of it didn’t even register. But Bobby Mercer was looking at him with interest, not fear. “I’ll bet there’s a helluva story to that,” he said, and he sounded almost friendly.

It cooled Dean down. God, since when had his temper come with such a short fuse? If he wasn’t careful he’d end up picking a fight with the guy just to relieve some stress and somehow he didn’t think that would be the best way to go about fixing what was wrong between him and Sam. It came to him all of a sudden that he was still hoping to fix things with his brother, and that this guy might be able to help. The last residual anger faded and Dean gave a little half grin, tipping his glass back towards Bobby. “There is,” he acknowledged, “but why don’t you tell yours first?”

It wasn’t a request.


	8. Bobby Calls

Bobby nodded, like he was expecting Dean to say that. “Like I said,” he took another drink, “Sam helped me out with a problem. A ghost problem.”

 

_8 months earlier_

 

The phone rang a couple times, and a woman answered. “Hello?” She sounded older, black.  Like Miss Angela three doors down who was always scolding the kids for hitting the puck into her flower beds when they played street hockey.  Suddenly Bobby realized he didn’t know what to say. La Vida Loco had slapped the phone number down in front of him three weeks ago, after everyone in the house was past being on edge from the sudden cold spots, the weird shit that seemed to happen just at the corner of your eye. Stuff moving when nobody was there to move it. For three days in a row Bobby had found Jacky’s bedroom door standing wide open, and he’d tore Angel a new asshole, told him to stay out of there. Angel swore up and down he hadn’t tried to go in, but no matter how many times Bobby locked the door to his little brother’s room, he’d find it standing open again.

Angel and Sophie got spooked. Bobby got pissed. Then drunk. But when Jacky and Ma’s faces started appearing in all the reflective surfaces of the house--not just the mirrors but the windows, the television screen, the god damned pots and pans--Sophie put her crazy ass bitch foot down. “Bobby you call this number. My sister, she says this person can help.”

“Your sister’s more crazy than you,” Bobby sneered, feeling pissed, and worried, and pissed that he was worried. He wanted to get the hell out of there and out of the conversation. Go out and find a pick up game so he could blow off a little steam. But it was a pointless wish, no one in the neighborhood would play him because when Bobby Mercer needed to unwind it was usually at the expense of some other guy’s face. “She stares at teacups!”

“She reads tea leaves!” Sophie yelled. “It’s a gift. Rosalita’s got special talents!” Bobby scoffed and made a rude and highly suggestive noise about Rosalita’s special talents. But for once Sophie didn’t rise to the bait. “She says we got problems here, and they ain’t the kind you can solve by taking a swing at something, you asshole. We need help. Professional help.”

 

“Right,” Bobby shot back, feeling like things were spinning out of control and not liking it one fucking bit, “I’ll just look up ghost busters in the Yellow Pages.”

“You moron,” Sophie screeched, god that woman had some lungs on her, “that’s their number.”

“Angel, man, help me out here,” Bobby appealed to his younger brother. “I’m not calling a fucking fortune teller because the heating is fucked up in this house.” But Angel, who for a Marine sure was good at not getting in the middle of a fight, looked back and forth between his girl and his brother and naturally went with the option that would get him the most pussy. “Bobby, you know something weird’s going on. Jerry can’t even bring the girls over any more because they get too scared. Call the number, man. It can’t hurt.”

Three days later Sophie said she was going to her sister’s until Bobby fixed the situation. She left, no doubt dragging Angel along by his dick. And Bobby found himself standing in an empty house that didn’t feel fucking empty, calling some stranger.

“Hello? Hello?” He came back to the present with a jerk.

“Uh, hello?” he answered.

“Bobby Mercer? Is that you? Why’d it take you so long to call? You got better things to do with your time than taking care of your mama’s house?”

Bobby found himself wondering if he shouldn’t just find himself a ruler and whack himself on the knuckles to save the lady the trouble of doing it for him.

“Don’t be silly, boy, I’m all the way down here in Kansas. And I don’t go round whacking grown men with rulers.”

What the fuck?

“And don’t cuss at me!”

\---

Bobby looked up at Dean, who’d snorted into his beer. “I guess you know her.” Dean grinned. “That must have been Missouri Moseley.”  Bobby nodded, a little morosely. “I didn’t make such a good first impression,” he said.

Dean actually laughed. It felt good, really good. Like something loosened up in his chest that had been stuck.  “The first time I met Missouri,” he confided, “she told me off for _thinking_ about putting my boots on her coffee table. And don’t believe that crap about the ruler. She’ll whack a grown man if she thinks he deserves it.” Dean paused, “she usually uses a spoon, though.” Dean shook his head, looking backwards into some of his better memories. “Man, she would have been the babysitter from hell. Can you imagine?”

It was Bobby’s turn to huff out a surprised  laugh.

\----

Missouri listened to Bobby’s story, and then she said, “Honey, your Sophie was right. You need some help. I’m gonna send you somebody who can take care of the problem for you.”

“She’s not my Sophie,” Bobby interjected, but the lady on the phone ignored him.

“His name’s Sam. Sam Winchester, like the rifle. He’ll be there tomorrow night. Where should he meet you?”

Feeling like Alice stuck in Wonderland, Bobby named off a bowling alley  down by the park. “That’ll do,” she said, like she knew the place. Like this woman in Kansas had a clue about some run down bowling alley on the east side of Detroit.  “And Bobby Mercer,” she added, “Sam’s a good boy. Don’t you go giving him a hard time just to make yourself feel better.” She hung up the phone, and Bobby was left staring at the receiver and wondering if he should just go ahead and get that fucking ruler.


	9. Sam

When Bobby got to the Cardinal Lanes the next night, Sam he’s-a-good-boy Winchester was already there, and attracting the wrong kind of attention. Bobby ordered himself a beer and some cheesy fries from the bar at the back and then turned around to observe the scene. Sam was sitting at one of the tables tapping away at his laptop and generally looking clueless. But Bobby thought that might be part of Sam’s camouflage. For one thing, he’d sat at the one table in the whole place that put a wall at his back and gave him a good view of all the exits. Bobby didn’t think he’d done that by accident. There were other tables with better light and more room. For another thing, while Sam’s upper body was hunched over and doing a decent impression of being small and harmless, Bobby could see the way his legs were crammed under the table. The guy was big, but he was used to hiding it until he needed it. And for another, Sam Winchester was wearing the latest in the Goodwill fashion line, which hung shapelessly off his big frame, but Bobby could  tell he was packing. One gun, and at least one knife. Bobby wondered if Sam Winchester usually walked around armed to the teeth.

The potential lethality of Sam Winchester went unnoticed by Hector Morales, the latest punk-ass gang banger wannabe to start making noise in the neighborhood. Guys like Hector usually left Bobby alone, because Bobby Mercer had a well-earned rep for being unpredictable and violent. Not to mention bat-shit crazy and strong as fuck. But strangers were fresh meat, and Hector was eyeing Sam’s laptop like he was already thinking about all the porn he could load up on it. He sauntered over to Sam’s table, in full view of his latest entourage. “Yo man, I need your computer.”

Sam looked up, like he was just now noticing the big black guy looming over him. As if, thought Bobby. “Sorry,” he said smiling and friendly-like, and Jesus H. fucking Christ, it was a kid. A kid with puppy dog eyes and fucking dimples. “I’m working on something so I can’t let you borrow it.” He actually sounded sorry.

“Who said anything about borrowing, bitch.” And Hector reached out to grab the laptop off the table. Then things went weird, fast. Moving so quickly Bobby didn’t even see it happening, Sam slammed the laptop closed hard on Hector’s grasping fingers. Hector yelled in shock and yanked his hand back, and damn if it didn’t look like one of his fingers was broken. “You don’t get to call me bitch.” said Sam, flatly.  Hector started forward, clearly ready to get into it, but Sam straightened up, his jacket falling open, and Hector the moron finally saw the gun he should have noticed five minutes ago. He stopped short, and Bobby, in the interests of keeping the peace because he was such a model citizen, picked that moment to make his presence known.

“Fuck off, Hector. He’s with me.” Bobby strolled forward, still eating his fries. Hector and Sam both turned their heads to look at him as Bobby came up to them, and then Sam unfolded himself from the under the table and stood up to shake hands, like Bobby was the fucking president or something. Hector, who didn’t top  five foot eight on a good day, got one look at Sam’s six foot four frame and faded back into the background.

“Don’t mind him,” said Bobby, sitting down. “That ass wipe doesn’t have the sense God gave those bowling balls.” Sam smiled, and Bobby squinted so as not to get blinded by the dimples. “You must be Bobby Mercer. Nice to meet you.” “Nice to meet you too,” said Bobby, twisting the cap off his beer. “So you’re a ghost buster.”


	10. Sam and Bobby

Sam’s eyes looked a little misty as he followed the smooth motion of Bobby’s hand as it opened his beer. “Yeah, I am. Among other things.” 

“You want one?” Bobby asked with his mouth still full of fries, waving the bottle in front of Sam’s face.  The guy seemed to come back to himself with a start.  “Huh? No. Sorry.” he looked sad and a little embarrassed. “You just remind me of someone, that’s all.”

Bobby looked at the him, waiting for an explanation. “My big brother,” Sam answered the silent question.  “He opens his beer like that, eats fries like that. Actually,” and here Sam smiled with all his perfect teeth, “you’ve got this whole big brother vibe going on.”

And that was so on the money it was almost creepy.

“Anyway,” Sam shook off his mood, “all Missouri said was that you had a ghost problem and you needed help. “

“I guess I do,” said Bobby, swallowing and trying not to feel like he’d turned the corner into crazy land. “It’s my Ma, I think.” And Bobby looked Sam straight in the eye. “And my little brother.”

“Tell me about it,” said Sam.  And so Bobby did.

He told Sam how Evelyn Mercer had been killed in a grocery store hold up a week before Thanksgiving, and how all of her sons had come home for the funeral.  How after the service, they all went looking for the punks that had shot her. And how they had found out Ma’s death hadn’t been an accident, hadn’t been a case of wrong place, wrong time -- she’d been murdered, she’d been _executed,_ all over a  fucking building permit. (And here Bobby knew he was doing a piss poor job of keeping the rage, the utter fury he still felt,  off his face). Then he described how the Mercer boys had declared war on the guys responsible, going on a rampage that didn’t end until the man behind it all, a local crime boss named Victor Sweet, was under the winter ice of Lake Michigan, his eyeballs being chewed on by fishes.

“But it didn’t happen fast enough,” Bobby looked hard at the man across the table. “Before we could put Sweet down, he got to Jacky.”

Bobby made a point of watching Sam as he told the story. And he didn’t hold anything back. Why, he wasn’t sure. Detroit’s finest had beat him bloody looking for answers to Sweet’s disappearance and he hadn’t felt the slightest inclination to talk about anything except how ugly their wives were and what sluts they were in bed. So where the whole confessional thing was coming from was a mystery. Maybe he still  wanted to give the kid that hard time the phone lady had warned him off of. Spook the kid a bit as payback because Bobby Mercer had spent the last month being spooked in his own damn house.

But it was more like Bobby recognized something familiar in the figure sitting across from him. Maybe violence called to violence, because even without Sam’s little display for Hector earlier, Bobby could see that the kid breathed violence like air. He did a good job of hiding it, toning it down. But as Jacky used to say whenever Bobby called him a fairy, it takes one to know one.

And maybe Bobby was testing Sam a bit, too. The story of what went down after Evelyn Mercer died was a legend in the area, and even the cops gave the Mercer brothers a wide berth these days. Bobby watched Sam’s face as he all but laid out how he had murdered several people, assaulted several others, thrown one guy out a fifth storey window, poured gasoline on a couple of others and threatened to light them up.

The only reaction he got out of Sam, though, was a couple of raised eyebrows as he absorbed the story.  Most people would be having an attack of the vapors, sitting across the table from a murderer listening to how they offed their victims. 

When Bobby finished, Sam sat there for a few moments, tapping his fingers nervously, but obviously thinking and trying to absorb it all. “And when did you start seeing the ghosts?” he suddenly asked.  Like the multiple homicide part of the story was just wasn’t the interesting part.  And what kind of fucked up life did Sam Winchester have if it wasn’t?

Bobby thought about the question.  “Ma and Jacky’s faces in the mirrors? That’s been going on about a month now,” he said. “But it’s a weird thing…” he trailed off, trying to think how to put it into words.  Sam waited him out.

“When we all came back for Ma’s funeral,” Bobby went on, wondering if he was going to make a fool of himself with this story, “it was Thanksgiving.  It didn’t feel like there was shit to be thankful about, really. Ma was still all over that house, man. She had the half the laundry folded, sitting on her bed. I had to…had to move it out of the way.” Even now Bobby’s heart did a little double-thump at the memory of picking up the basket of her stay-at-home shirts.  “I swear to God I kept expecting her to walk in and start giving me hell for not taking my boots off at the door.” Bobby stopped, feeling his throat tighten up. Sam’s gaze on him was steady.

“We cooked Thanksgiving dinner--me and my brothers. Well, Jacky cooked it. The grown ups watched the hockey game on the television. “ Bobby leaned forward suddenly. “You gotta understand, we didn’t know. That something was fucked up about the way Ma died, I mean. More fucked up. We all just thought she’d been killed in a robbery that went south. Wrong place. Wrong time. The Mercer boys are kind of famous for that.”

“But when we sat down to eat, well, we all kept looking at the end of the table, like she was there. Like Ma was sitting there making sure we minded our fucking table manners. Jerry told me later he could just hear her telling him to slow down and chew his food. Angel spent half the meal yanking his sleeves down his arms like he was trying to keep Ma from seeing he had a new tattoo.  And Jacky…” Bobby’s voice trailed off again. This time Sam prompted him.

“What about Jacky?”

Bobby blew out a breath, took another drink, and gritted his teeth. God dammit, why the hell was he even here? “Jacky,” he went on, “just stared at the empty place at the table like it was a life line, like he was listening to Ma talk him down from the ledge.”  Bobby looked up at Sam with hard eyes. “None of us had what you’d call a perfect childhood,” he said. “But Jacky had it bad. Really, really bad.”  His hard look dared Sam to comment.  But Sam just nodded like he got it, and said “So Evelyn Mercer was your foster mother?”

“She was my Ma,” Bobby shot back, angry. “Jerry, Angel,  Jacky--they’re my _brothers_.”

“Yeah, man, I know” said Sam, and he sounded a damn sight older than he looked at that moment. “It’s not blood that makes a family.”  Thanks for the fucking Yoda moment, thought Bobby morosely. Somebody cross stitch that on a pillow.

Sam was swirling his drink--was that _tea_? Did this place even have tea?--around in its glass, watching the circling liquid. “So do you think your brothers were just missing your Ma, imagining her there at the table with you? Or do you think they actually saw her?”  “Fuck if I know,” said Bobby, feeling stubborn all of a sudden. This baring your soul crap was for the birds.

“What about you,” asked Sam. “Did you see her?”

And there it was. Time to shit or get off the pot.  Being the badass that he was, he held out for all of six seconds.

“Not then,” Bobby finally said, sounding quiet, defeated. “Not at dinner. But after it was all over? Yeah, I saw her.”


	11. Ghosts

“It was closer to Christmas, after it all went down,” Bobby went on. “The bastards that killed Ma…and Jacky….were dead. The cops had lost interest. It all kind of felt _over_ , you know? Time to get back up and move the fuck on and all that shit.  And normally I’d be gone. I never could really settle down in one place for very long. I just get into trouble if I do.  But I’d stuck around this time to fix up Ma’s house--there was a lot of damage from the shoot out.”

That, at least, got a reaction out of the unflappable Sam. “Shoot out?” he asked. 

“Sweet sent some of his guys over to persuade us to back off. It didn’t work. That’s when Jacky got killed.”

“I’m sorry, man,” said Sam.  Bobby could tell he meant it, and miracle of fucking miracles it didn’t make Bobby want to clock him. For some weird reason he felt like he was telling Sam a story that the guy already knew.

“So we’re all there; Jerry, Angel, Sophie--that’s Angel’s crazy piece of ass--Jerry’s wife, his kids. It’s like we’re all rebuilding. Not just the house, but the family. The women call everyone in for dinner, and I’m standing there in the yard putting up the tools, and when I look up, it’s like I can see Ma, sitting there on the front steps, smiling at me and _knitting_ , for fuck’s sake.” Bobby thought about how Ma was always doing something with her hands--knitting, cooking, writing letters, smoothing the wrinkles out of Jerry’s shirts, smoothing the blankets over Jacky or Bobby as she coaxed them to sleep after their nightmares. “She told me it was good to see me,” he said to Sam. “She asked if I was going to stick around this time.”

“So you did,” said Sam.

“Yeah, well,” said Bobby, “No one likes to say no to Evelyn Mercer if they can help it.”

Sam smiled at that. “She sounds like an amazing person.”

Bobby just nodded, appreciating the present tense. She had been the most important woman in the world to him, and she was gone, and he didn’t get to have her in his life chewing him out for getting in trouble or fighting or coming home three sheets to the wind ever again. It absolutely sucked ass.

“So when did things start to go wrong?” Sam asked. Because seeing your dead Ma sitting on the front steps of the house knitting and telling you to stick around apparently didn’t count as “going wrong.”

“Hard to say,” said Bobby. “It’s an old house, you know? So there’s always heating problems, old wiring crapping out, fuses getting blown, shit like that. The place is a money pit. And none of us are Martha fucking Stewart, so stuff goes missing, gets lost, gets spilled, dropped, broken...it’s not like a beer gets knocked over and you think ‘ghost’ for fuck’s sake.”

“Any bad dreams?” Sam asked. And that made Bobby pause.

“Well, yeah, but that’s nothing new,” he answered. “Why do you think we all drink so much?”

For some reason, that comment seemed to hit Sam hard. He blinked a bit like something was in his eyes before he got it together enough to keep talking.  Bobby guessed his older brother was a bit of an alcoholic.

 

\----

 

“Hey,” said Dean, who’d been remarkably quiet as Bobby talked,  “Just because it kills your liver don’t mean it ain’t medicine.” He sounded like he was quoting his daddy.

 Bobby tipped his bottle in acknowledgement and Dean called the barmaid over to order another round.

 

\----

 

“So when did you know that it wasn’t just old wiring?” asked Sam. 

“Stanley Cup playoffs, that spring,” said Bobby. We were watching the Bruins annihilate the Penguins and in the middle of the game the television goes nuts. We get a screen full of snow, and Angel starts banging on the set to get the reception back,  and then the screen goes black. Not dark, like it’s been turned off, but _black_ , like we were watching a show of a room with all the lights off. And there in the reflection on the screen I could see Jacky, looking out at me. I know Angel saw it too, because he jumped back from the television set like it had bit him. And then it was gone, and the game was playing again.”

“Me and Angel didn’t talk about it, but after that things stepped up a bit.” Bobby told Sam about the cold spots, and the lights, and how Jacky’s bedroom door wouldn’t stay shut, and how Jerry’s girls were too afraid to come over to the house now. “At first it was just Jacky,” he said, “so quick you thought you were just imagining things. But then it got so you couldn’t look at anything with a reflection without seeing him looking out at you. Sophie tried covering up all the mirrors and he just showed up in the windows.”

“How did he look?” asked Sam.

“How the fuck do you think?” exploded Bobby. “He looked exactly like the last time I saw him. Like he was dying, and like he was scared.”

Sam let Bobby’s anger wash over him. “And what about Evelyn? Was she there too?”

“Not until a couple weeks ago,” Bobby answered. “That’s when Angel and Sophie told Sophie’s wacko tea-leaf-reading sister what was going on. She’s the one who gave me the number to call. Couple of nights ago, they gave it up and went to stay with her. At least, Sophie went. Angel probably just tagged along because he thinks with his dick.”

Bobby leaned forward again, wanting to get his point across. “Look man, you want to know what they look like? Jacky looks like he’s scared and he’s hurting. And Ma, she’s looking at Jacky like he’s tearing her heart out…like she wants to hold on to him but can’t even reach him. I mean, you’ve got family, right? People you’d do anything for? If that’s really Jacky and Ma stuck in those mirrors I’ve got to do something. Jacky’s my little brother, man…I’m supposed to be watching out for him. I already fucked that up once, so I’ve got to make it better for him, wherever he is. And I’ve got to do something to get that look off Ma’s face. She should be in heaven knitting mittens for angels, not stuck in some mirror crying over her dead son. So whatever it takes. I mean it.”


	12. Sam Stops Smiling

Bobby sat back and ran a shaking hand through his hair. He hadn’t meant to lose it like that. But now it was Sam’s turn to learn forward. “Listen, Bobby” he said earnestly, “we can fix this. I promise. We can give Jacky and your Ma the peace they deserve. We can give your family the peace you deserve.”

Bobby smiled bitterly at that. “There’s plenty of folks that would tell you the Mercer boys don’t deserve shit.”

“Well that’s clearly a load of crap,” said Sam, and he sounded completely positive about it. “One last question, and then if it’s okay with you I’d like to go to the house and see things for myself.”

“Shoot,” said Bobby, conscious that he’d passed some kind of milestone and he now trusted Sam of the puppy dog eyes and knife hidden in his jacket sleeve Winchester.

“Has there been anything besides the lights, the cold spots, the faces in the mirrors? Any accidents?” Sam asked. “You mentioned beer bottles tipping over, doors being opened. Was there anything that might have ended up getting someone hurt?”

Bobby shook his head, bewildered. “How do you mean?”

Sam waved his hand around in a vague “oh, you know” gesture. “Things like, say, you’re cutting vegetables and the knife slips for no reason, and you almost cut yourself. Or you’re walking down stairs and you suddenly trip, or feel like you were pushed. Stuff like that.”

“Nah,” said Bobby with decision, “nothing like that.” 

“You’re sure?” Sam pressed.

“You think they’d try to hurt us?” Bobby exclaimed, “No fucking way. Not in a million fucking years. Ma would never. Jacky would _never_. Why the fuck would you think that?”

But Sam was packing up his laptop and hauling himself up. “That’s good,” he was saying, nodding his head as he unbent his long legs, transforming himself from a human pretzel into something the size of a moose. “That’s real good. Let’s go take a look. Did you drive here?”

Bobby nodded as Sam actually bused his drink cup and left too much money in the tip jar on the counter. Jeez. He really was a good boy. “I’ll follow you then, I can’t leave Baby here,” he said as they walked out to the parking lot. Bobby followed Sam’s gaze and landed on a beauty of a car--‘67 Chevy Impala, black, sleek and gorgeous. He whistled. “Nice ride.”

“Yeah, real nice,” said a voice. “Now give me the fucking keys, your wallet, and your god damned computer, or I’ll blow a fucking hole in your head.”

Jesus Fucking Christ on a stick. Hector Morales really was a moron.

Hector hadn’t even finished talking and Bobby hadn’t got past saying “Hector you dumbass fucking piece of…” and Sam was already moving. His long legs covered the ground fast and before Bobby had even taken a step after him Sam was standing in front of Hector, who looked like he couldn’t understand how the guy could suddenly be right in his face like that. Sam grabbed the gun with one hand, brought his other fist down hard on Hector’s wrist, and Bobby heard a bone crack. Hector shrieked, and the next thing he saw was Sam, holding Hector’s gun to the punk’s own head. “Tell your friends to back off,” he hissed, pressing the muzzle hard against Hector’s temple. The “friends” were a couple of freaks from the Morales posse and they were still gaping at Sam, hadn’t even tried to draw their guns. Stupid shits. “Tell. Them. to. Back. Off.” And Sam pointed the gun down and blew off Hector’s knee cap.

 

\---##---

 

Dean choked on his beer. “Sam did what?!”

“I know, man,” said Bobby. “Shocked the hell out of me. I didn’t think he was the type to go the rails like that.”

Dean was shaking his head in denial. “Sam does not just shoot people for the hell of it!” he insisted, “Not human beings.” Which should have sounded weirder than it did. Dean tried to think of any time in their admittedly very crazy and violent lives where Sam had shot someone just to make a point--at least when he wasn’t possessed or hallucinating--and came up completely blank. Dean couldn’t even remember a time when the kid had to be talked down off the ledge. Usually it was Sam talking Dean down. So much for the whole “I took a year off and shacked up with a girl” scenario. If Sam was shooting punks, even punks that had it coming, then things must have been really bad.

“Yeah well,” said Bobby, “That was the first clue I had that there was something really wrong going on with him. It was a clue the size of a fucking bus, though.  Turns out, it was all about the car.”

 

\---##---

 

Hector screamed and dropped. Freaks one and two took off running. Bobby stood there, pole-axed. So he heard every word when Sam crouched down to look at a whimpering Hector Morales and said “You ever lay a finger on that car, you even _breathe_ on it, you even come within a city block of that car, and I will end you. Got it?” From the sudden smell of piss coming from Hector’s pants, Bobby guessed that he got it. Sam smashed the butt of the gun down on Hector’s temple and the guy fell back on the asphalt, out cold. Sam stood back up and started walking away towards the car, leaving Hector sprawled in the middle of the lot. Bobby caught up with him.

“What the fuck was that?”

Sam turned to look at Bobby, his face set in hard lines that made it impossible to believe he had ever smiled in his life, much less with dimples. “You asked if I had family? People? I’ve got no one, not any more. Everyone is gone. Every single person. The only thing I’ve got is that car. Nobody messes with it. It was my brother’s.”

Good boy, my ass, thought Bobby. He hoped nobody had called the cops. He hoped if they had, the cops would be too busy eating donuts and shaking down liquor store owners to come.


	13. Jacky

By the time they each pulled up in front of the house, Sam seemed to have got his psycho alter-ego under wraps, and he was back to being the nice, sympathetic young man you wanted to confess all your secrets to. And Bobby was starting to think he’d turned into a girl with a crush. 

Bobby unlocked the front door and ushered Sam in. The house, for once, was warm. And the hall light, when Bobby flicked it on, glowed warm and steady. Sam fished something that looked like a walkman with delusions of being a 50s era Caddy out of his duffle bag and flipped it on. There was a high, steady whine and the lights across the top all lit up.

“What the hell is that?” 

“EMF meter,” answered Sam as he wandered around the first floor. The whine kept up at a steady pitch. “Stands for electromagnetic frequency. Ghosts give off electromagnetic energy--that’s why your lights sometimes flicker--so it’s a good way to tell that one might be around.” 

“Jesus. I really am in a scene from the Ghosts Busters,” muttered Bobby. Sam just grinned at him, and then peered up the stairs. “Can we go up?”

Bobby waved him on, and followed behind, suddenly remembering Sam’s voice saying _you’re walking down stairs and you suddenly trip, or feel like you were pushed. Stuff like that._ If something pushed Sam down the stairs he’d come down right on top of Bobby and they’d both break their necks. The guy was massive.

When Sam got to the top of the stairs, the sound from his gizmo ratcheted up a notch. Bobby came up behind him while Sam was turning a slow circle in the hall. “God dammit to hell,” Bobby said softly. Sam’s head jerked up to look at him. But Bobby was staring at Jacky’s bedroom door. It wasn’t just open, it was off its hinges.

“Approach with caution,” Sam had said. Bobby felt like he was a zoo keeper trying to get close enough to the tiger to feed it without losing an arm. He and Sam walked slowly towards Jacky’s room, Sam’s  steps light and sure like a boxer’s, like he was ready to pivot instantly in any direction, and Bobby’s steps hard and angry, as if that wrenched-open door was something he could intimidate into behaving. But nothing happened, and they ended up crowding each other in the empty door frame, looking in.

“I’m guessing this is Jacky’s room,” said Sam, taking in the rock posters, the band photos, the piles of CDs, the guitar propped up against the bed. “Yeah,” said Bobby, a fresh wave of grief washing over him. God it hurt to look at this stuff. Everything that Jacky was…everything he’d made of himself, just _ended_. Bobby just wanted to close the door and seal it all in, so that things would never, ever change. 

Sam stepped into the room for a closer look, his eyes resting on the photos pinned with tacks over the bed: Jerry, Jacky and Angel when Jerry’s first little girl had been born. Jacky and Ma at his high school graduation--Jacky was playing air guitar in his cap and gown and the look on Ma’s face…god she looked happy, and so, so proud of him. The four of them on the ice with their sticks--Jacky was standing behind Angel pretending he was about to whack him on the head.  Bobby, smiling a bloody smile that was missing a couple teeth and holding the league trophy cup. Bobby, sprawled on the couch and flipping the camera the bird. Bobby and Jacky, arms around each other’s shoulders and laughing at each other--faces so close that if you didn’t know they were brothers, you might think they were something else altogether. 

Sam’s eyes lingered on that photo, and on the photo with Ma. “Would you say you and Jacky were close?” he asked. Bobby glared. “I mean,” he tried to explain, “I can tell you guys are all real close. But was it especially true of you and Jacky? Like if there was something wrong was it you that would notice first? Was it you Jacky would come to first?”

Bobby sat down on the bed, causing a small puff of dust to float up into the air. Sam sat down next to him, still looking at all the photos. “It was kind of like that,” Bobby said. 

“It’s just…,” he went on. “we were the lost causes. All of us. The kids no one wanted. Ma had a rep for being able to place kids from the system into permanent homes, but no one would touch any of us.” Bobby sneered. “We were all too fucked up, in too much trouble too much of the time. Damaged goods.” 

“But Ma, she wouldn’t let us go back in the system. She kept us.” Bobby pointed at the photo of the four of them. “Jeremiah’s dad was some kind of religious wacko. Believed in _scourging_.” Sam’s face darkened. “You know, Jerry refused to set foot in a church until the day he got married. One of his foster families tried to make him go to mass and Jerry set fire to the church the night before just so he wouldn’t have to go there the next morning. And Angel,” Bobby pointed at the next figure in the picture, “his mom was a crack addict. Angel used to hustle just to feed them both. But he put a knife in a guy that got too rough and ended up in Juvie. He used to say that was a step up because you could see the assholes coming.”

Bobby looked at the photo of him and Jacky. “Jacky’s mom was a drug addict too, didn’t mind selling out her baby boy for a fix.” He looked up at Sam’s solemn face. “We don’t know for how long it went on before CPS got to him, ‘cause Jacky wouldn’t ever say. But Jacky came to us when he was twelve, so you do the math.” 

“God in heaven,” muttered Sam.

 “I don’t think so,” said Bobby.

“So what made you two so close?”

“Let’s just say, I knew where he was coming from,” said Bobby levelly. His own step father had either been drunk or horny. If he was drunk he punched. If he was horny he fucked. “When I was old enough to fight back, I took a crowbar and put my step dad in the hospital,” Bobby told Sam, smiling with vicious satisfaction. “He’s in a wheelchair now. Nothing works from the waist on down. He shits into a bag.”

\---##-----

Bobby was watching Dean, just like he’d watched Sam, as he talked. Back then, Sam’s eyes had been dark and angry, but all he’d said was “Jeez. Ghosts and demons I get, but people are just crazy.” It had freaked Bobby out a bit…the fact that he couldn’t freak Sam out. Now he knew a bit more, so he wasn’t surprised when Dean -- eyes the same kind of dark as his brother’s--just shook his head and said “Christ. Ghosts and demons I get, but people are just crazy.”

“Amen to that,” said Bobby.

\---##----

 “When Jacky came Ma told me to look out for him,” Bobby went on. “And he kind of became my responsibility. I taught him the ropes, you know? How to play basketball and hockey. Got him his first pair of skates. Taught him how to fight dirty. Taught him what to do with a girl. Covered for him when he got drunk, showed him where to hide his pot. I’d dropped out of school by then but I used to hang around the yards and watch out for him…made it clear that anyone who laid a finger on Jacky would get it broken. Warned the pushers off from selling him the hard stuff.   Stuff like that.”

“And you helped with the nightmares,” Sam guessed. Bobby just shrugged. “Jacky felt safe with me. For long time we shared a room because Jacky couldn’t sleep unless I was between him and the door.”

\---##----

Bobby looked across the table at Dean, who was staring at him with a fixed expression. “Sam didn’t say anything after that, not for awhile. I guess I hit a little too close to home.”

“I guess you did,” he answered.

\---##----

Eventually Sam seemed to shake himself out of the reverie he’d fallen into listening to Bobby talk  about his brothers. “Why were you keeping the door locked?” he finally asked. Bobby shifted uncomfortably like he didn’t want to answer, knocking his knee into the guitar, making a discordant note. “I told Angel and Sophie it was because I hadn’t had a chance yet to pack up his things,” he said. “But they knew I was lying. I just couldn’t stand to see all this. Every time I come in here it hurts all over again like the day he died.” He turned to face Sam with a fierce expression. “It was my fault. I didn’t look out for him. I dropped the fucking ball.”

“You didn’t shoot him,” Sam pointed out.

“I didn’t stop him from getting shot,” Bobby said. Sam didn’t have an answer for that. 


	14. Fixing Things

As they talked, the room had been getting colder. Bobby hadn’t really registered it, but Sam noticed right off. When it was cold enough you could see your breath, he stopped looking around the bedroom and focused himself. “I think someone’s here,” he said “and wanting to say hello. Where’s the closest mirror?”

“In the hall,” Bobby pointed down the passageway towards Angel’s room. Sam grabbed his hand and pulled him up. “Show me,” he said.

Bobby felt wrung out. He didn’t want to look in the damn mirror. Didn’t want to see in graphic detail just how badly he’d failed his baby brother. But Sam strode forward without letting go of his hand, even when Bobby tried to yank it away. He turned and looked at him, in full puppy dog-eyed sympathy mode “I need you to do this,”  he said. “If we’re going to fix this we need to see exactly what needs fixing.”

“Christ you’re a manipulative bitch.” Bobby grumbled, before remembering suddenly the way Sam objected to that particular word. But Sam just smiled, almost fondly. “You use what you got,” he said, and pushed Bobby in front of the mirror.

He saw exactly what he knew he’d see. There was his own reflection, looking angry so he wouldn’t look desperate. Behind him the reflected hall was empty, even though Bobby knew Sam was standing right there. Instead, where Sam’s bulk should have been hovering there was Jacky staring at him. He looked frightened and hurt, teeth and lips red, choking on his own blood as he opened his mouth to say…what? Help me Bobby? Don’t let me die? This is your fault? And standing behind Jacky was Ma, her bright blue eyes shining with tears as she stared at her youngest boy like she was willing him to turn around and come to her.

But of course Jacky didn’t.  His own eyes were fixed on Bobby, still begging, always begging him for help. Bobby had to curl his fingers into fists so tight his nails bit into his palms to keep from reaching out to the image of his brother in the mirror, or to spin around and grab him where he was wasn’t really standing there in the hallway. Jacky’s mouth opened in a last silent gasp - or maybe a scream - and the mirror cracked with a sudden sharp sound.  Bobby flinched. And Sam, who had been leaning against the far wall, watching, frowned slightly.

“Let’s find an all night diner and get something to eat,” he suggested, not looking the least bit fazed by watching a gory family drama in a mirror that wouldn’t even show his reflection. “And I’ll tell you what I think we can do.”

The Fantastik Diner - “that’s fantastik with a k,” said the waitress as she led Sam and Bobby to a booth - -## - -looked like the kind of place that only existed at three in the morning,  like it had escaped from an Edward Hopper painting. You couldn’t imagine it on a sunny day, full of busy people talking on their phones or tapping away at their iPads. The fluorescent lighting gave everything a greenish cast against the dark night outside the windows.  There were less than half a dozen people in the place, including the waitress and the cook, and everyone looked temporary, lingering ghosts hunched over their cups of bitter coffee, stuck that limbo that existed between night and morning.

“Whatllyahave?” asked the waitress, pen poised over her order pad

“Just coffee,” answered Bobby, because when in Rome, you know.  “And he’ll have…are you kidding me?” incredulous, when Sam ordered a chef’s salad. It threw the waitress for a loop too. She looked like she’d forgotten it was even on the menu. “Uh, what kind of dressing would you like?” she asked Sam, clearly struggling to repress her first impulse to say “chips or fries?”  “Just oil and vinegar” Sam answered, and Bobby rolled his eyes.

 

 - -## -  -

 

“Sammy eats like a rabbit,” said Dean. “He’s always going on about being healthy and watching your cholesterol and crap like that.”

“If God wanted me to watch my cholesterol,” said Bobby, “he wouldn’t have created bacon.”

Dean tipped his beer in a silent toast

 

 - -## -  -  

 

In the quiet of the diner Bobby felt himself settling down and getting his bearings again. Either the surreal world he’d been living in since he first laid eyes on Sam Winchester four hours ago had finally righted itself, or Bobby was starting to get used to the weird.  He was leaning towards option number two.

In any case, when Sam’s salad arrived - a bowl of shredded lettuce with some carrots and cucumbers cut into haphazard chunks - Bobby realized the only thing he’d had to eat all night were cheesy fries and a couple of beers. The coffee was sitting sourly in his stomach, so while Sam did something prissy with his little cups of oil and vinegar, Bobby reached over and stole all the ham off his chef’s salad.

“Hey!” complained Sam, sounding about fourteen years old.

“So tell me about ghosts,” said Bobby. “I think I’m ready for the whole the truth is out there speech.”

Sam looked a little startled when Bobby said that, but then he gave a brief laugh. “Right,” he said taking a drink (of water. With _lemon_.) “Ghosts are real. Demons are real. Fairies, shape-shifters, dragons, witches, leviathan creatures that eat people…all real.  Werewolves and vampires... real, but nothing like you see on television.” Sam stopped, tilted his head. “Bigfoot is a myth, though,” and he grinned like he just told the world’s funniest joke. Must be an inside one.

Bobby said “So you’re not a ghost buster, you’re more like, what, a monster hunter?” Sam did a little bow in his seat as if to say “At your service.”

Bobby whistled lowly. “That’s some fucking job you got, Sam.”

“Yes it is,” Sam responded. “But at least it doesn’t pay  and there aren’t any benefits.”

Bobby shook his head. “And Ma and Jacky are…ghosts?” he asked sadly. “How does that happen? How come they aren’t whoopin’ it up on a cloud in heaven or something?” Even though he wore a cross Bobby had butted heads with the man upstairs his whole life and he knew his guardian angel had abandoned his post years ago. He wasn’t on speaking terms with God and he wasn’t expecting life to be fair. But both Ma and Jacky definitely had a pearly gates condo coming to them and if that hadn’t happened, then somebody somewhere had fucked up royally.

Sam got serious. “Ghosts are the spirits of people who can’t let go of this world and move on to what’s next,” he said, almost gently. Like he was a doctor breaking bad news to the family of a patient. Maybe he was. “Usually, it’s because someone died a violent death, and the spirit, or soul, couldn’t make the transition, so they get stuck. Kind of half in and half out of this world.  But sometimes a person’s spirit will stay because they have something unfinished in their life and they can’t let go until it is resolved. I met a ghost once of a woman who had been murdered by a cop, and she wouldn’t leave until she’d led us to the evidence that showed what he’d done.” Sam sighed. “And sometimes ghosts stay because they just refuse to leave their life, or they don’t think they deserve whatever comes next.”

“Comes next?” asked Bobby

“That’s beyond my pay grade,” said Sam.

 

 - -## -  -

 

“Which considering he’d just told me he worked pro bono wasn’t saying much,” Bobby said to Dean.

“It’s also not true,” said Dean bitterly. “Sammy is an expert on ‘what comes next.’ He’s the fucking world’s expert on what comes next.”

Bobby stared at the man, but he didn’t sound like he was kidding.

 

 - -## -  -

 

“If dying a violent death makes you a ghost then Detroit is the most haunted fucking city in the country.” said Bobby. “Why don’t I have Victor Sweet breaking my mirrors and fucking with the heating?”

“Maybe if you hung out by the lake you would,” said Sam, “but I doubt it. Ghosts are spirits that saw that light at the end of the tunnel and refused to walk toward it. Even though this world is fading to an insubstantial wisp all around them and that light looks like the only real thing, they turn their back on it and choose to stay with the shadows of their former life. And to stay, they don’t just have to refuse the light, they have to refuse the one sent to guide them towards it. That’s very hard to do, because a guide never wants to let you wander around alone and lost. So you have to be….really focused, really desperate, or really, really mad to do that. Most people just aren’t that determined.”

The hair on the back of Bobby’s neck rose straight up as Sam talked, and he realized that he might actually be afraid. Of Sam. Ghosts of his dead brother and dead mother he could deal with. Punks waving guns they were afraid to shoot, no problem. Bring it on. But Sam sitting there quietly talking about what it felt like to die… as if it was familiar, as if he _knew_ …was just about the scariest thing Bobby had ever encountered.  It put a serious damper on his inclination to steal any more of Sam’s food.

“And the ones who are that determined, aren’t always who you’d expect,” Sam was going on, oblivious to Bobby’s white-knuckled grip on his coffee cup. “It’s not usually the serial killers who stick around, it’s the victims. The ones who were vulnerable and suffered for it, and now can’t let the past go.” He pinned Bobby with an earnest stare that almost made the other man flinch. Sam’s eyes glowed in the green light, on fire with some otherworldly knowledge and that tore it, Bobby was now officially hysterical.

Then Sam shoveled a huge fork full of salad into his mouth, and abruptly Bobby was back on earth again, looking at a guy eating horse fodder like it tasted good. “I think,” Sam said, trying to spear the last chunk of carrot sliding around in the bowl, “that’s what has happened with Jacky. I think this all revolves around him,” he paused “well, Jacky and you.”


	15. Bobby and Jacky

Bobby’s head snapped up. “Me? How is this about me?”

“Jacky’s been trying to get your attention,” Sam answered. “That’s why he’s showing up in anything with a reflective surface.  I’m guessing that your brothers see him too, but only sometimes. But you are seeing him everywhere.” Bobby squirmed a little bit, because he’d tried to gloss over the whole “I see dead people” aspect of his current life.  “That’s also why Jacky’s bedroom door won’t stay shut,” Sam continued. “He doesn’t want you to shut him away. He wants you to go in.”

Sam looked at Bobby with sympathetic understanding. “You guys had a really close connection. Jacky’s trying to talk to you.”

“To say what?”

“If I had to guess?” said Sam, “Help me.”

Not what Bobby wanted to hear. “Help him? Help him what? Help him how?”

“Bobby,” said Sam,  “I’m sorry about this, but I think what it comes down to is that Jacky is just afraid of dying. He’s doing what he’s probably done all his life when he’s hurt and scared…he’s asking his big brother to fix things.”

“Oh, god.” whispered Bobby.

“Little brothers know they can always count on their big brothers to make everything better,” said Sam, sadly.

 

\---##---- 

 

Dean reeled back in his seat. “Shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit goddamn and _fuck_.”

“That’s basically what I said,” said Bobby.

Dean felt like Sam had just kicked him in the teeth, long distance. God damn, where had he learned to guilt trip a body like that? A confused mix of feelings bubbled up in his chest. Gratified, that Sammy was still looking to Dean to make things right--that at the time Dean still held that fixed spot in Sam’s universe. Fear, that maybe Dean had lost that place in recent weeks. Anger, that Sam could sit there and talk to some guy he’d just met about being brothers when he wasn’t lifting a finger to find Dean.

Dean called the barmaid over and asked for whiskey.

 

\---##----

 

“Sam,” said Bobby, “How the fuck am I supposed to make things better? How do I ‘fix’ Jacky? He was shot, for fuck’s sake. Come to that, how do I ‘fix’ Ma?”

“There are ways to break the link, the bond that’s holding a spirit to this world,” Sam answered. “Once it’s broken, a spirit can’t stay here.”

“Great. Like what?” said Bobby.

“The most common solution,” said Sam bluntly, “is to dig up the body, salt the bones, and burn them.”

“WHAT?!” Bobby stared at the other man.

“Spirits are usually linked to their own remains,” said Sam. “Salt is a purifier. It cuts the link the spirit has created between the two worlds. And fire destroys the physical thing the link is attached to.” Except for a lingering air of regret, Sam could have been talking about getting the stains out of his favorite shirt in the laundry.

“You are not…not…. _digging up_ Jacky so you can SET FIRE to him,” hissed Bobby fiercely. “And you sure as hell ain’t digging up my Ma! Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“It’s not always the remains,” said Sam, seemingly unfazed by Bobby’s appalled reaction. “It can be an object…something that was very important or symbolic to the person when they were alive. Like jewelry, or a book, or a piece of clothing.”

“You  are not burning anything of Jacky’s. Or Ma’s,” Bobby insisted.

“No,” agreed Sam. “I don’t think that would work in this case.”

“Good,” said Bobby, and then, “Why not?”

“Because,” said Sam, “I think Jacky is linked to you. And we can’t really salt and burn that.” He grinned.

Bobby, on the other hand, wasn’t finding Sam’s gallows humor all that humorous. “Linked to me,” he said flatly.

“You were close. Very close,”  said Sam. “Jacky is doing what he’s probably always done from the day he first accepted you as his family. He’s holding on to that emotional closeness because that is what he does when he’s hurt. You can’t break an attachment like that. You can’t salt it, or burn it. You could _reject_ it…” Bobby glared ferociously and Sam waved his hand in dismissal like he wasn’t making a serious suggestion, “…but you aren’t going to do that. So you have to meet him half way. Jacky wants to talk to you, so you need to talk to him. Convince him that it is okay to let this world go. Convince him to move on to what’s next.”

“I don’t fucking know what’s next. How am I supposed to convince Jacky to walk into some fucking light? Who the hell knows what’s there?” And okay, so Bobby was suspicious, even paranoid about the afterlife. So sue him. God tended to be a dick to the Mercer boys and he was just going on past experience.

“Well I think we have some help,” said Sam, “Evelyn.”


	16. Evelyn

“Ma?” Every time Bobby thought he was getting a handle on things, Sam threw him another curve ball. “How can she help? She’s trapped like Jacky.”

But Sam shook his head. “I don’t think so.  Jacky’s been with you for awhile, but Evelyn has only just shown up in the mirrors a couple of weeks ago. “

“Ma was here last year!” Bobby protested.

“That was different,” Sam insisted. “That story about your brothers seeing her at Thanksgiving…your story about seeing her near Christmas…those aren’t stories of a person trapped between two planes of existence. Your Mom was just staying long enough to say good bye, and to tell you everything would be okay.”

The funny thing was, Bobby got what Sam was driving at. That Thanksgiving dinner had been sad and tense at the beginning, until Jeremiah, Angel and Jacky had all relaxed, one by one. As if the thought of Ma scolding them about their table manners made a Thanksgiving dinner without her bearable. The only person who hadn’t relaxed had been Bobby. He remembered feeling more and more wound up, until he finally broke and dragged everyone out onto the ice for a game and an excuse to knock some people around. He wondered why he hadn’t seen Evelyn that day. Maybe he just hadn’t been ready to face her.

“Bobby,” Sam was saying, “I think Evelyn is here to help bring Jacky over to the other side. In the mirror, she’s not looking at you, or trying to talk to you. She’s trying to reach him. Remember when I said there’s a guide? Jacky rejected his guide to be able to stay here with you. I think Evelyn came to be his guide instead. You said Jacky saw her as a life-line. Would he reject her if she called him? Would he refuse to follow? Or would he trust her?”

Bobby swallowed, thinking back to the day after his fifteenth birthday when Evelyn had taken him to the hospital for a six week stay in their rehab clinic. To Bobby the drugs had kept him numb enough not to care about his shitty life. At least when he was high he wasn’t thinking about walking in front of a bus. But Evelyn had known he was using and she wouldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t let him accept it. The moment she found out, she’d booked a spot for him in the program.

He was already starting to sweat and shake from the withdrawal and he didn’t want to go in and be abandoned yet again. But she had taken his face in between her small hands and glared fiercely into his eyes. “Bobby Mercer,” she’d said, emphasizing his new last name, “I am not going to leave you. I am not abandoning you. But you are going to be more sick than I can deal with at home. I need you looked after. I need you in a place that’s safe so you can get better. Because now that I have you I am never letting you go,” Bobby stared into Evelyn’s bright blue eyes. “But Bobby,” she’d said, dropping her hands down to grip his shaking ones, “You can’t let me go either. I choose you, Bobby Mercer. But I need you to choose me. You need to walk in that building with all the bravery I know you have, and let yourself get better, so that you can come back home. You have to want to come back home.”

And Bobby, strung out and barely able to think straight, burst into tears for the first time in his life, and he promised right there and then that he’d go wherever she asked, do whatever she wanted, and that he would always, always choose to come back home to his Ma.

“Yeah,” Bobby said to Sam. “Jacky would trust her. We all trusted her. She was about the only person in the world we did trust.”

“So that’s what we have to do…or what you have to do,” said Sam.  “Convince Jacky to let you go, and take Evelyn’s hand. She’ll take care of everything. Isn’t that what mothers do?”

“Should do.” answered Bobby, well aware that his own biological mother and Jacky’s piss-poor excuse for one had missed that particular memo in the parenting department. And he thought it was odd that Sam Winchester could talk about dying like he’d been there, but talked about mothers like they were something he read about in a book.

“We don’t have much time,” Sam said. “Evelyn knows that. It’s why she’s crying.”

“What  does that mean?” Christ. What else? “How can we not have time? Jacky’s a ghost. He’s not going anywhere.”

“No,” said Sam, “but he’s starting to lose control. We really need to stop that from happening.” Sam stared into the dregs of his now empty glass, the lemon a pulpy mess at the bottom. “One of the reasons we hunt ghosts,” he said, “is because they tend to become violent. A ghost that is left between worlds like this can go a little crazy, especially if the situation that is making them stay is never resolved. They’re existing in a kind of continuous loop--stuck in one place while the world moves on. So they get angry and start to lash out, and they can hurt people when they do.”

“Jacky wouldn’t hurt me.” Bobby knew that. Knew it like he knew what day of the week it was, what kind of porn Angel liked best, where Jacky kept his eyeliner hidden so his brothers wouldn’t give him grief when he wanted to doll up for a gig.

“Jacky has already broken a mirror and taken a door off its hinges because he’s frustrated. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself,” Sam was implacable. “Look,” he said, and his voice sounded infinitely sad, “There was this man, he was like a father to me and my brother. Our Dad died years ago and this guy…his name was Bobby too…he stood by the two of us through everything. No matter how rough it got or how badly we fucked up.“ Sam looked down at the dirty dishes in front of him. “Excepting for _my_ big brother, he was the best man I ever knew. A better friend than I ever deserved.” He looked back up again, his hazel eyes wide and earnest.

“Our Bobby died last year. He was shot. But he was a stubborn old cuss who refused to leave us.  And like with Jacky, weird stuff started happening. Things would get moved. Stuff we were looking for would suddenly be in plain sight. Things we needed would show up just at the right moment. It was as though  he didn’t think his job of watching out for us was over, you know?”

“But then we caught up with the guy who had killed him, and even though he was a spirit, Bobby’s anger started to get out of hand. He broke a girl’s arm by accident trying to get payback. He almost got a woman killed because he was so blinded by anger he just didn’t care about the consequences. He almost strangled _me_ in a rage when I got in his way trying to get _her_ out of the way.

The expression on Sam’s face was anguished. “He would have hated what he was becoming. Our Bobby would never have wanted to be like that. And as terrible it was to be at his side and watch him die, it was a thousand times worse to see his spirit, all that he was, all the good in him, disintegrating into a vengeful, unrecognizable madness.” Sam skewered Bobby with a look. “You DO NOT want that for Jacky.”

Bobby licked his suddenly dry lips, shaken. “What…” he had to clear his throat, “What happened? To your Bobby?”

“We got through to him. We let him go. And he let us go.” Sam sighed. “I’m assuming he’s upstairs in the penthouse suite eating his wife’s peach cobbler,” he waved his hand in the general direction of the dark sky through the windows. “God knows he deserves it.”

 

\---##---

 

In the dimly lit bar, things were picking up a bit. A group of guys who had “military” written all over them had settled around the pool table and were getting their kicks running the barmaid off her feet. Bobby and Dean both tracked them in the automatic way they did when assessing a potential threat, and watched long enough to confirm that while the group might like to play with guns, none of them were carrying.

Dean was still trying to suss out what he felt about Sam’s confident statement of faith. _Excepting my big brother, he was the best man I ever knew._ Dean thought he’d beg to differ. Bobby never dropped the ball the way Dean had. Never let either of the Winchester boys down for even a second. And then there was the more worrisome _a better friend than I ever deserved_.  Did  Sam really live his life believing he was “undeserving?” That he was tolerated, not loved? That whatever crap life threw at him, he had coming?

Dean felt a little sick. How the hell did his baby brother even get out of bed in the morning? What if one day he decided it just wasn’t worth it?

Bobby Mercer watched Dean disappear a bit into his head and let him. The guy looked like he’d just been told a family member had cancer. Instead, Bobby decided to give the barmaid a break from the assholes that were currently making her life miserable. He called her over and started asking what else they could order by the bottle and where the closest motel was. The girl was obviously grateful for the gesture, and the next time she topped off their drinks, she made them doubles, no charge.

 

\---##---


	17. Interlude

Dawn in Detroit didn’t come with a soft rosy glow, but in more of a washed out and anemic mauve colored creeping toxic spill staining the lowering clouds.  Trucks making early morning deliveries started to appear on the street, their headlights strangely bright against the muted shades of morning. More people were straggling into the “Fantastik” diner -- which wonder of wonders did not just disappear in the daylight -- and a two waitresses showed up to take over from the girl who’d had the graveyard shift. It all looked even less fantastic than ever.  Bobby downed the last of his now cold coffee and took a hard look at Sam sitting across from him. It was the first time he’d seen him in anything resembling natural light.

The guy looked tired, but also like he was used to being tired, like fatigue was just one of those things he didn’t notice any more, the way Bobby no longer noticed the pull of the scar tissue on his back or the ache in his oft-broken finger joints when the cold set in. Bobby would have guessed Sam to be about thirty. He looked younger but the way he carried himself seemed older.  Seen too much, Bobby thought.  PTSD or some shit like that. If Bobby had met him under different circumstances, he’d have thought “war vet.” Maybe he was.

But Sam’s eyes were still clear and alert when he pulled himself out of wherever his thoughts had drifted and looked at Bobby. “I think you should come back to my motel room with me.” he said.

Bobby smirked and raised his eyebrows. Sam huffed a laugh and shook himself. “Look,” he said, “ it’s been a long night. We need to get some rest before we go back to your house and try to confront Jacky. It will be hard, talking to him, and he’ll probably be upset, so we both need to be ready.”

“You mean, if he throws a temper tantrum and smashes more mirrors? Jacky always was a bit of a girl.” The fondness in Bobby’s tone  belied the flippant words.

“Or tosses around furniture,” answered Sam. “There  are precautions we can take so I can protect you while you try to reach him, but I’d rather not go into it without any sleep. And right now the house is empty, right?”

“Angel and Sophie are at her sister’s. ”

“That’s good. But you shouldn’t be there without someone to watch your back. Stay with me until we’re ready to do this.” It was half request, half order. Bobby acquiesced without a fight though, long past the point where he had to assert his dominance in every situation. Besides, they’d driven to the diner in Sam’s “Baby,” and Bobby didn’t see the point of making him drive all the way back. Sam was starting to look like he would drop at any moment. Best get somewhere they could both take a load off.

Although ….”Jeez,” Bobby said, as they pulled in to the lot of  grimy establishment Sam was holed up at, “did you go looking for the skankiest dive in Detroit? Because I think you found it.” Sam just shrugged. “I’m not picky,” he said, opening the door to his room with a shove that made it clear the lock was just there for show. “No shit,” said Bobby, peering into the dingy space.

There were two  beds, one covered with papers and clippings, like someone was doing a class project and it was due tomorrow. A table and two chairs were shoved under the single window. A coffee maker and microwave sat on a side table, doing a halfhearted imitation of a kitchenette. The bathroom was a shower, a toilet and a sink and all three took up less space than one of the beds. The television faced the foot of the beds and it was clear the establishment’s owners knew their clientele because it had cable, and you could order porn. There was a little easel advertising Casa Erotica….hell, were they up to 26? Bobby had some catching up to do.

Sam scooped up the papers from the bed nearest the window and dumped them on the table. Then, moving like he was running on automatic, he fished a can out of his duffle and poured something white along the edges of the window and the door. He fished another can out of his bag (didn’t he have any clothes in there?) which turned out to be spray paint. He painted a couple of symbols on the door and the walls.

“I take it you aren’t worried about your security deposit,” said Bobby as he watched this ritual.  Sam smiled. “Not really. I paid for the room with a fake credit card. This is all just…precaution.”

“What’s the white stuff?”

“Salt.”

Salt. Bobby reached back in his mind to their earlier conversation. “Salt….purifies,” he said.

Sam nodded approvingly. “That’s right.  Evil spirits, ghosts and demons can’t cross a salt line. It’s probably not necessary…your Jacky couldn’t follow us here because he seems tied to the house. But you never know what other entities are out there you might inadvertently stumble into. I’m not exactly known for my good luck.” He shut the window’s curtains against the rising day and dropped down on the bed he’d just cleared. “Help yourself,” he said, closing his eyes and waving his arm towards the other bed in the gloom.

Bobby sat down, tested the mattress and decided he’d slept on worse. He lay back, still fully clothed, his boots hanging off the end of the bed. He was out in less than a minute.


	18. Interlude: Waking

“Stop it.” Jacky’s teeth were bright red with blood and his eyes were wide and frightened. “You’re not real,” he said to Bobby, who reached out for him. “Jacky, man….hey now, you little fairy…Jacky, it’s me, it’s me.” But Jacky wouldn’t listen. “Not real,” he moaned, blood spilling out of his mouth, “Not real, no, no not real…”

Bobby woke with a gasp, adrenalin surging, Jacky’s voice still loud in his ears. “Not real, not real, stop it stop it, no nonononono…”

Abruptly, he realized it wasn’t Jacky’s voice, it was Sam’s.

The room was slightly less dim, the late morning sun bleeding through the drawn curtains covering the window. In the other bed Sam was…not thrashing, but looking like he wanted to be, only his limbs were tied with invisible rope. At some point he had shed his jacket and shirt, his shoes and his socks. His strong arms bulged with tension, straining the fabric of the plain white undershirt he wore. His bare feet jerked and twitched, like something was stinging the bottoms of his soles. And Sam’s head was thrown back, neck corded by the strain, while he muttered a steady litany of “Not real not real not real,” and his fingers curled into fists so tight Bobby thought Sam might break the skin of his palms with his own fingernails.

Bobby pushed himself up off the bed and moved over to Sam’s side of the room. He hesitated a second--waking someone up from a nightmare was always tricky. Jacky used to come out of them flailing. And to his everlasting shame, one time Ma had tried to rouse Bobby out of a night terror and he’d hit out at her before he knew was he was doing. Knocked her right off her feet. He’d gone three weeks drinking himself into a stupor every night on the theory that if he had another nightmare he’d be too drunk to hurt to whoever tried to wake him up. Ma wasn’t impressed with his solution.

Sam, who right then looked about the size of a Volkswagen minivan, could probably do some serious damage if he woke up swinging. Although it twisted something in Bobby’s stomach to see him there, his body struggling against the non-existent restraints.

“Sam.” he said, laying his hand lightly on the man’s bare ankle. Sam responded with a quick mutter in a vicious tone that had Bobby thinking he’d just been cursed in an exceptionally and creatively foul and insulting way that was lost on him since he didn’t speak Latin. He shook Sam’s leg slightly. “Sam, man, come on, wake up.”

Sam’s voice notched up a key “you’re not real, not real…” and then, horribly,  “I got out. I’m out. You’re lying. I’m not there anymore, I got out, they got me out…”

Bobby didn’t want to hear any more of _that_. He took a risk and gripped Sam’s arm, shaking him harder. “Sam! Wake up!”

Sam surged up with a gasp, as if he’d been drowning and was suddenly offered air. He grasped Bobby’s upper arms in a painfully strong grip - Bobby could feel the finger-shaped bruising starting to form under the large hands. For a moment Sam’s face was only inches from his own and Bobby was forced to look into eyes filled with wild panic. The hazel irises were blown black and ringed by white as Sam’s eyes all but rolled back in their sockets. Bobby thought “seizure,” but Sam stayed frozen, panting into Bobby’s face, and he realized the other man was counting his breaths, trying to calm himself down. Bobby wondered how often this kind of thing happened to Sam with no one there to witness it or help. “ _I’ve got no one, not any more. Everyone is gone. Every single person._ ” Sam’s words in the parking lot of the bowling alley came back to him.

Sam drew a deeper breath and carefully unbent his fingers from around Bobby’s arms, which now ached. “Sorry, man” he said, sounding defeated. Taking a chance that he wasn’t crowding into Sam’s space, Bobby sat down on the edge of the bed, toeing off his boots while he tried to think of something to say. “I tried waking you up from a safer distance,” he finally said, “but you weren’t coming out of it.”

“I get nightmares sometimes.”

No shit, Sherlock. “Sometimes?”

But Sam just shrugged, like it was unimportant, and ran a hand through his long hair. He turned his face to gaze at the curtained window, outside which the Detroit day was going into full swing, the not so muted sounds of traffic bleeding through the walls.

“You want to talk about it?” Bobby asked, and wasn’t surprised when Sam just shook his head slightly without looking at him.

Bobby looked at the man for a moment, wondering, and then thought “What the hell?” He laid a hand on Sam’s leg, waited until he turned back to look at him. “Want me to help you take your mind off it?” he asked.

Sam stared at Bobby, his gaze solemn. Then he blew out a breath. “Yeah,” he said softly, “Yeah. Why not?”  He shifted, opened his arms and reached. Bobby met him half way.


	19. Dean explains

\---##----

 

The look on Dean’s face was…not encouraging. His lips were pressed into a thin line and his fingers twitched around his whiskey glass like he was suppressing the impulse to hurl it at someone.

“I take it you don’t approve,” said Bobby, prepared for the other man to get all papa bear over some guy banging his little brother. But Dean just shook his head sharply, an abortive, irritated motion. “It’s not that,” he said, “Sammy’s a big boy.”

Bobby deliberately _did_ _not_ smirk.

The truth was, despite all the weird things people thought about the sex lives of the Winchester brothers courtesy of Chuck aka Carver fucking Edlund’s fucking books, Dean knew that he and Sam were pretty prosaic about sex. They certainly weren’t as kinky as some of the stuff the wackos had written about them. And god knows they weren’t kinky for each other. It still pissed Dean off that they were jerk off material for so many nut jobs. He really tried not to think about it unless he was training and needed the incentive to feel properly violent.

No, they had been raised in an environment of benign neglect. John Winchester had been an excellent drill sergeant and a stellar teacher when it came to hand to hand combat with and without knives, but he’d ignored most of the other responsibilities that came along with parenting and it had been left to the boys to come to their own conclusions about things like sex, drugs, and which sports teams were worth their devotion.

Hell, they had grow up in an endless string of seedy motels that weren’t exactly family establishments. Half the time the Winchesters were probably the only ones not paying by the hour. Dean learned to make his signature mac and cheese recipe from an aging hooker who’d taken a shine to the two boys during one month-long stint in a town he couldn’t even remember the name of. And despite being trained to kill monsters, the first time Dean ever pointed a gun at someone it was a meth addict who had broken into their room looking for something to steal, and who then offered to Dean a blowjob in exchange for anything worth any money. Then there was the week Sam had befriended some scrawny rent boy, taught him how to read and tried to get the kid to go back to school. A lost cause, that, but the boy had given Sam a facts of life lecture that had made Dean want to beat in the head of the boy’s disappeared father. It was useful information though. John Winchester would have been freaked to discover the many creative ways Sam and Dean could make sex safe.

The upshot being, while Sam and Dean would probably both call themselves straight, they’d both seen the full range of what people would do for sex by the time they were old enough to drive and neither of them were hung up on labeling any of it. Dean had done his share of sleeping around on both sides of the street and he knew Sam had too. The fact was, when your job mostly consisted of slitting the throats of monsters, decapitating the heads of vampires, and digging up moldering bones of old graves because some poor kid had suffered at the hands of daddy dearest and was looking for eternal payback, when you finally took a moment to relax and let off a little steam, you weren’t overly concerned about whether the person you picked up had a dick or a pussy. Warm and willing and, well,… _human_ …was what you wanted.

“Did Sam ever tell you,” Dean went on, “what the nightmare was about?” His voice was grim.

“No,” said Bobby. “I didn’t push it.”

Dean downed his glass and poured himself another from the bottle they’d finally convinced the barmaid to leave on the table.

“A couple years ago,” he said, “we were in this big fight, a battle really, and Sam…Sam… _sacrificed_ himself to save us… _all of us_.” -  Something in his voice made Bobby think “all of us” meant something a little more than, “those of us standing right next to him.” -  “…Sam was captured, uh, behind enemy lines, I guess you could say. It was over a year before we could get him out.” Dean took a shaky breath. “When we got him, he was in a bad way. He’d been tortured, by someone who knew what they were doing.  Tortured, every day, for more than a year.” Dean’s eyes were a curious combination of hard and wet. “But Sam was amazing. He survived, and when we got him back he kind of kept everything that had happened behind a wall in his head, and just insisted that he stick with us. He refused to be left behind on hunts, he was manic about being able to watch our backs. I think he kind of put himself back together just so he could be there for us.”

Bobby didn’t say anything. He didn’t even breathe.

“But it wore Sammy down,” Dean went on, “keeping all that hell locked away. Our lives aren’t exactly boring. Eventually cracks started to show, things started to bleed through. It started with nightmares, and then small space-out moments. Then voices, seizures, and eventually full-blown hallucinations.” He laughed despairingly, “We couldn’t stop it, couldn’t help. And Sam kept saying it was alright, because he could tell, you know? What was real and what wasn’t. Until the day he couldn’t.”

Bobby still wasn’t breathing, afraid to interrupt.

“He actually pointed a gun at me once,” Dean said, “thinking I was the guy who’d tortured him--his own personal devil. I had to physically _hurt_ him to get him to focus.” Dean could still remember the way the blood felt seeping up through Sam’s bandaged hand as he’d forced his thumb into the cut palm. “His brain went so haywire that it wouldn’t let him sleep. He ended up on the psych ward of a hospital when he walked into oncoming traffic after scoring a bunch of downers trying to put himself under. They didn’t work. Neither did the sedatives the hospital gave him. Nothing did. He went eight days without sleeping before they got a handle on it. He almost died. Lost all his fingernails and was minutes away from kidney failure. And all the time he was apparently seeing his torturer, who was telling him that he never escaped, it had all been a trick, he’d never got free and never would.”

Dean poured them each another glass, and they both downed their drinks in one go. “I’ve never been so scared for Sam in my fucking life, which is fucking saying something,” he said. “But since you seem to be a friend with benefits, you should know when he’s talking in his sleep, and he’s saying ‘not real not real not real,’ that’s what he’s dreaming about.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” said Bobby.

 

\---##-----


	20. Coffee

The next time Bobby opened his eyes it was to a darkening room. He was on his back looking at the grey ceiling in the gloom. Sam was laying next to him on his stomach, one arm across Bobby’s waist, one leg bent and pressed between his legs. His face was tuned towards Bobby but there wasn’t much of it to be seen under all that hair. He was sleeping soundly though, so Bobby didn’t move even though he was aware of a mild need to take a piss.

Instead he thought about his little brother. A little brother who in a short while he would have to convince to leave Bobby and his family and the only place Jacky had ever accepted as home.  Twelve hours ago, Bobby wouldn’t have thought it could be done. He wouldn’t have had the slightest clue how to tell Jacky that it wasn’t over for him, even if it was over for him _here_. It’s hard to make someone believe in something better to come when you don’t believe it yourself.

But that had changed over the long and surreal night. Sam, Bobby thought. Sam had changed things. And it wasn’t just that Sam was the most interesting person to come into Bobby’s orbit in years, although Bobby couldn’t deny he was drawn to the other man’s strange combination of vulnerability and lethality.  It was more like Sam had opened a door to new possibilities, and Bobby found that he wanted to walk through it. It had been a long time since Bobby had thought about the future like he might have one, but he was thinking that now. And if he could see the chance of a new life for himself, maybe he could convince Jacky there was something, something good, waiting for him. Ma certainly thought so. She was there, waiting to take Jacky onwards, and for once Bobby could contemplate the thought without the wrenching guilt that he usually felt. Ma wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt her boys. Jacky could trust her. Bobby would trust her. Always and forever.

Bobby sighed softly, and wondered if Angel could be convinced to come back to the house to stay once Jacky’s ghost has moved on. Bobby didn’t think he’d be sticking around after all. The restlessness was back, and now there was something new to go after. Bobby wanted to hit the road. Next to him Sam stirred slightly, and then settled back down, his big heavy body pressed close to Bobby’s side. Bobby rested his hand on the arm over his waist, and settled back, thinking about what it would be like to hunt down monsters.

It was an hour later before Sam started to stir. By then Bobby’s need for the bathroom had gone from  a mild interest to an absolute imperative. “Get off, you damn gorilla,” Bobby  shoved Sam’s leg over and moved Sam’s arm off from where it had been pressing down on his bladder. He climbed out from under the other man and strode naked towards the tiny bathroom. Sam’s head came up off the pillow, hair in a wild halo around his face, and he watched as Bobby, who was in too much of a hurry to even shut the door, relieved himself with a long happy sigh. “Perv,” he grinned when he saw Sam staring. Sam just grunted and let his head fall back down.

Since he was up, and since there were a couple towels on the rack, Bobby went ahead and took a shower. He was surprised when he got out and walked back into the bedroom to see that it was dusk. His internal clock was all fucked up. He and Sam must have slept for most of the day.

Sam was up, wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else, standing next to the coffee maker and fiddling with it. He’d turned a light on so he could see what he was doing, and Bobby found himself once again watching, as though Sam would always be the most interesting thing in any given room. “Are you rewiring the damn coffee maker?” he asked.

“It wouldn’t turn on,” Sam answered, “but I think it’s just a loose connection somewhere.” He was digging into the guts of the thing with a pen knife. “Aha!” he said, teasing out a frayed wire. He trimmed it, stripped it, and poked it back in with a little twisting motion of the knife tip. Then he set down the appliance, most of its guts still hanging out, shoved one of those pouches in the filter bin, and poured in the water from the scratched glass pitcher he had sitting ready. He flipped the switch. It came on. “Ha!” he crowed.

“You an electrician when you aren’t killing monsters?” Bobby asked, and Sam laughed. “A little appreciation, please” he complained. “I had to fix it before I had my coffee, just so I _could_ have my coffee. You’re lucky I didn’t accidentally blow it up.”

Bobby seriously doubted there was anything in an ancient Mr. Coffee machine that even could blow up, but he patted Sam on his bare shoulder anyway. “Good boy,” he said. “Fuck you,” Sam smiled, and disappeared into the bathroom to take a shower.


	21. Security

It was almost full dark when Bobby and Sam got back to the house, and Detroit was once again a city defined by the harshly lit spaces under street lamps, sputtering neon signs, and the bright crowded windows of the 24-hour markets and check cashing stores. On Bobby’s street the sidewalks were empty, but the houses up and down the street were lit with the flickering activity of people watching television, eating dinner, sitting at their computers, playing their video games. Ma’s house was dark, though. Neither Bobby nor Sam had thought to leave any lights on when they had left the previous night.

Sam pulled up next to the house, under a street lamp, so the black beauty of a car was spotlighted in the yellow glow, a predator on wheels. Bobby suspected that Sam didn’t want to chance anyone breaking into the thing, although if someone had their sights set on it, a street lamp wasn’t going to do shit. “You afraid of your Baby getting stolen?” Bobby asked.

Surprisingly, Sam shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “she’s got a kickass security system installed.” Which was bullshit, because the car was pristine like it still thought the year was 1967. There wasn’t so much as an extra wire or blinking light or even a Lo-Jack knocking around on the floor in the back. Bobby said as much to Sam. “It’s not that kind of security system,” said Sam, and tapped under the dash. Bobby twisted his body to take a look, and saw that the underside of the dash was covered with the same kind of symbols that Sam had spray painted on the motel room door and walls.  “They’re in the doors and under the floor mats too,” said Sam.

“Did you fill the door space with salt?” asked Bobby, only mostly kidding. Sam laughed. “Hell no,” he said, that would rust out Baby’s doors. Dean would never forgive me. But there are hex bags in the doors and in the seats.”

“Dean’s your brother?” asked Bobby

Sam shut up, pressing his lips together and obviously sorry he’d let his guard down and opened his mouth. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Dean’s my brother.” He picked at the black leather band he wore on his wrist.

“You said everyone you had was gone.” Bobby pressed.

“Dean’s dead.” Sam said. “At least, I think he’s dead. It’s a long story.”

Bobby thought that most of Sam’s life was probably one really long story. “Sorry, man.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, and got out of the car. He moved to the back and opened the trunk. Bobby followed him, coming around in time to see that the underside of the trunk lid was scribbled with more symbols.

“So this crap stops anyone from stealing the car?”

Sam pointed to a couple pentagram-shaped designs. “Keeps out demons.” To a few runes. “Proof against witches and warlocks, also deters most faerie folk.” To a couple other figures that looked like something Prince would have used to sign his name when he wasn’t being Prince. “Hides us from angels.”

“You hide from angels?” asked Bobby.

“Angels are _dicks_.” said Sam viciously. And then he pointed to a small cloth bag dangling from one of the struts. “Hex bag. Sort of keeps us from being noticed. You see the car, but you just don’t pay attention to it.”

“I see the car just fine,” said Bobby, “Car like this deserves a bit of attention.” Sam smiled, shaking off his moodiness. “She likes you,” he said. “So you have permission to notice her.”

“What the hell does that…..holy fucking _shit_!” Bobby forgot his question the moment Sam popped the false bottom out of the trunk. “Jesus Christ. You’re a serial killer, aren’t you? Fuck this ghost and monster shit. You’re a fucking psychotic serial killer.”

“Well I’ve had my moments,” said Sam.

Bobby stared, fascinated. The trunk of the Impala was crammed full of guns, knives, axes, cudgels carved with intricate designs, and was that a sniper’s rifle?  A machete. A crowbar. A crossbow for fuck’s sake. Several flare guns. Cans of gasoline. Not to mention a weird assortment of more esoteric shit--dream catchers, crosses, bags of salt, a big clay jar that looked like it came from a museum. Books in languages that didn’t use the Roman alphabet. White feathers. Iron nails. Handcuffs etched with weird symbols. Glass jars filled with stuff that looked like ash or dirt.

“What the hell,” Bobby said, wonderingly.

“Tools of the trade,” said Sam, selecting a few things--including the crowbar--and shoving them in his duffle,  then he grasped the lid of the trunk with his large hands and slammed the top down.

“So does all that New Age crap actually work?” asked Bobby as the two men climbed the front porch steps to the door. “Because I give Sophie shit about her crystals all the time. If they really work I’ve just lost my favorite way to piss her off.”

“They work if you know what you’re doing,” said Sam, “most people don’t.”

They had decided to set up in the living room, because Sam wanted to have the space to maneuver. Together they shoved the chairs back against the walls, moved the coffee table out of the room, and Sam even went so far as to take the pictures off the walls. When Bobby asked, all he said was that broken glass was a pain to clean up. Then he rolled the rug out of the way, and poured salt in a large circle in the center of the floor. “Stand in the middle,” he said to Bobby, pointing. Bobby did, feeling like it was he and not Sam who was being the good boy. Sam took the hall mirror off the wall and leaned it in a chair facing Bobby. “But I’m betting we won’t need it,” he said.

“Why not?” Bobby asked, but Sam didn’t answer, just took another look around the room before picking up the crowbar and hefting it in his hand--making it look like a broom handle instead of a twenty-five pound piece of iron. “Listen,” he said, “there’s one thing you have to remember when you’re talking to Jacky: Don’t take his hand.”

Bobby stared at him. “It’s important,” Sam insisted. Don’t take his hand. Don’t try to touch him.”

“He’s my brother,” Bobby said flatly.

“And he needs you,” Sam said. “He wants you. But Jacky is _dead_.”

“So?”

“So he doesn’t care that you’re not.”

Suddenly the temperature in the room plummeted and there was Jacky, standing right next to Bobby outside the circle of salt. His shirt was bloody, his eyes red and wet, his face white. His bleeding lips formed slow words. “Bobby. Help me.”

And Bobby heard him.


	22. Jacky Cries

Bobby wasn’t ready. Unprepared for the rush of grateful feeling that ran through him from just being able to hear Jacky’s voice again after so long, when for months the only thing he could hear when he tried to remember it was the sound of Jacky screaming for his older brother. For a moment Bobby couldn’t say anything at all.

“Bobby, man, _please_!”

“Jacky…” Bobby cleared a suddenly hoarse throat, conscious that this felt like his earlier dream, “Jacky, I’m here. I’m listening, Jacky-poo.” He hesitated, because asking “How are you?” seemed patently ridiculous under the circumstances. “Are you okay?” he said instead. “Are you hurting?” Behind the pale figure he saw Sam leaning against the far wall with his hands in his pockets and looking remarkably unnoticeable for a six foot four giant. He was watching Bobby and Jacky intently, but the crowbar was nowhere to be seen.

“I’ve been trying to talk to you--you were ignoring me!” God even as a ghost Jacky was Jacky. A total girl.

“Sorry baby boy,” Bobby said - Sam twitched at the phrase -  “you know me. A bit thick. It took me awhile to understand what was going on. I’m here now, though. I’m paying attention. It’s good…,”Bobby swallowed, “…it’s _really_ good to hear your voice again, man.”

“But why wouldn’t you talk to me? Why were you blowing me off, man? Why was everyone acting like I didn’t exist?” Jacky turned and punched the wall, the heavy rings on his fingers tearing the wallpaper and leaving a dent in the plaster. Sam straightened up, becoming more alert. “And who the fuck are you?” said Jacky, whirling around to look at him, well on his way to a full blown temper tantrum. The windows rattled.

“Jacky!” Bobby’s tone was sharp and pure big brother, “Just because you dress like a teenage girl doesn’t mean you have to act like one.” Jacky’s shoulders slumped a bit and Bobby softened his tone. “Come on, Cracker Jack. You wanted to talk to me, here I am. It just took me a while to clue in that’s what you were trying to do. I’m sorry about that but this is all new to me, you know? Sam over there helped me figure it out. He’s okay, one of the good guys.” Theoretically. If you ignored the car trunk full of sharp objects and the fact he shot people when he lost his temper.

But Jacky’s response showed just how off base everything was. “What do you mean, you had to figure it out? How hard is it to fucking look at me? Talk to me? And why the hell did you keep locking me out of my own room?” Jacky wandered over to one of the easy chairs and sat on the armrest, his head bowed and his ghostly fingers tangled in his spiky hair. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was covered in blood, or that he made no impression on the chair as he leant against it. “I was freaking, man,” he was saying, “it was like I was suddenly not part of the family any more, like I didn’t belong, like I was invisible and you all just forgot I even existed.”

Sam’s expression was frowning, worried, but Bobby ignored it. “Jacky,” he said “Look at me.” Jacky’s red eyes focused on Bobby’s face. “You will always be part of this family. _Always_. From the day you came home with Ma you were ours. Tell me you know that.” Jacky nodded, visibly calming. “Yeah, yeah Bobby, I’m sorry man, I…” Bobby interrupted him. “And fuck you for making me sound like a fucking Lifetime movie, you little fairy,” he went on, “but you know you will always be mine. My little brother. In here,” Bobby’s palm splayed open across his own chest. “Even when you are across the country in fucking California, shaking your hips in front of underage girls and making them cream their panties, you’re still fucking here with me. I love you, man.”

Jacky gave a watery, happy smile. “Dude,” he said shakily, “Is this a proposal?”

Suddenly behind him, standing there like she’d been there all along, her hands clasped tight together as if she was praying, was Evelyn Mercer. Jacky didn’t seem to notice, but Sam and Bobby did. Sam eased back out of her way, and Bobby, looking over Jacky’s shoulder, met her loving, brimming blue eyes. He hoped that meant he was doing something right.

“You wish,” he said, focusing on his little brother and smiling. “You couldn’t handle this much man.” Jacky actually _laughed_. It was the best sound Bobby had ever heard. He took a deep breath. “There is one thing you were right about though, Jacky. You don’t belong here anymore.”

“What?” Jacky looked like Bobby had just hit him.

“There’s something better out there for you, Jacky, and you’ve got to take it. You deserve it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Jacky, man, where do you think you are?” Bobby asked.

“Huh? I’m home. We’re home. We’re in Ma’s fucking living room, and man she’s gonna kick your ass when she sees how you’ve trashed it. What were you doing? What the hell is wrong with you, man?”

“Ma’s dead, little brother.”

Jacky froze for a second and then shook his head, panicked. “No. No way.” He bounded up from where he’d been (metaphysically?) leaning against the chair and stalked over to Bobby, ready to reach out and grab him--the Mercer boys had always been physical with each other. They hugged and they hit. But he was brought up short inches from where Bobby stood, like he’d run bang up against an invisible wall. He looked at his older brother, shaken and bewildered.

“Jacky,” Bobby said, infinitely sad, “you’re dead too.”

“I’m…dead?” Jacky stared at Bobby, tried to reach out and grab his shoulder. But his hand stopped in mid air. He frowned, pushed, and pushed harder. Bobby once again found himself curling his hands into fists to resist the urge to reach out. _Don’t touch him._ Sam’s words echoed in his head. And Sam, who’d been pretty damn unobtrusive up until now, seemed to sense the conflict in Bobby because he’d straightened up and he was now holding the crowbar. “Look at yourself, Jacky,” Bobby said. “You’re covered in blood.”

Jacky seemed stunned as he looked down at his torn, bloody clothes, and his feet in the muddy boots which left no tracks standing right at the edge of the salt line.

“Ma was killed in a robbery, remember?” Bobby went on. “We all came back for the funeral, and we went after the punks that did it.” Jacky was shaking his head, hands clasped over his mouth, looking wild. “Come on, Cracker Jack, you’ve got to remember you me and Angel chasing those two scumbags down - the way I was driving almost made you piss your pants.”

“Oh god…” Jacky dug ghostly fingers into his hair. “They came to the house…”

“They did. It was a fucking army of them and you went down.” Bobby said, his voice thick, “And I’m sorry, baby boy, it was all my fault. I took my eye off the ball and you paid the price. If you want to kick my ass I’ll lie down right here and let you.”

But Jacky had started to shake with fear, and some of the smaller objects in the room started to shake with him.  “I don’t wanna be dead, Bobby,” he was actually crying, ghostly tears running through the blood on his face. Behind him Bobby could see Evelyn twisting her hands, distressed, and Sam tightening his grip on the crowbar, keeping a wary eye on the rattling knick knacks. “I can’t be dead, this can’t be real. Not real not realnotrealnotreal…” Sam flinched and Bobby felt icy cold shock run through him. “Hey now, Jacky,” he said automatically, as his dream from that morning came to life right in front of him, “Hey now Cracker Jack, it’s gonna be okay. I promise.”

“I don’t want to leave you, Bobby!” Jacky’s voice cracked

“I know, baby brother. I don’t want you to go. I’ve missed your annoying ass, the way you clutter up the bathroom with all your make up - you know Sophie’s shit doesn’t look half as good on me.” Bobby was talking just to fill the space, to keep Jacky focused on him.  “I’ve even missed hearing that racket you make on the guitar.” Jacky gave a despairing laugh. “But I promise it will be okay, baby boy. You’ll be with Ma. You know she’ll keep you safe.”

Jacky looked up at his older brother through wet lashes. “Ma?”

“Look behind you, Jacky,” said Bobby, “she’s been waiting for you.”

And Evelyn Mercer, sad and silent up to the moment, said “Jacky honey, come let me take you home.”

Jacky slowly turned his head, almost as if he were afraid to look, only to be disappointed. “Ma?” Evelyn stepped forward, both arms outstretched to gather up her bloodied son. “I’m here, sweetheart. I am right here.” She enfolded him in her arms and Jacky dropped to his knees like he was twelve years old again, threw his arms around her waist and clung to her. Lifeline, Bobby thought. Even the dead need them. Evelyn looked at him over Jacky’s head. “Thank you, Bobby,” she said warmly, her eyes shining, “thank you _so_ much.”

Bobby jerked his head, throat to tight too speak. Hearing Jacky’s voice had been a painful mercy. Hearing his Ma was a hundred times more bittersweet. He hoped he would always be able to remember the way she was looking at him right that second. Evelyn focused back on her youngest son. “Come on now, Jacky, come home. You’re always safe with me.” The room seemed to lighten as she spoke. Jacky looked up into her eyes. “Can Bobby come?”

“No, sweetheart, not yet,” she smiled, “it’s not his time.” The light in the room looked almost gold now.

“I don’t want to leave him,” Jacky cried, and twisted back to reach out towards his older brother, “Bobby! Come with us! _Please_!”

Bobby broke. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember Sam’s warning. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what would happen. But he didn’t care. A wave of longing crashed through him and suddenly nothing was more important than grabbing Jacky’s outstretched hand and going home with his family. He lunged forward, Sam’s startled exclamation barely registering, and reached for his brother and his Ma. The light around them flared, and then Bobby found himself on his hands and knees, the purity of the salt line broken and scattered around him, while he sobbed hopelessly, utterly alone and bereft.


	23. Coming With

\---##---

 

Bobby fell silent, and Dean poured the last of the bottle into the other man’s glass. “Chug it,” he said. Bobby did, gripping the glass tight to control his shaking fingers. He let the burn of the alcohol settle in his gut and took a deep breath. “I kind of checked out for a bit,” he told Dean, who didn’t look surprised at the admission. “Next thing I know I’m sitting on the couch and your damn brother’s trying to make me drink a cup of fucking _tea_. With fucking _honey and lemon.”_

Dean snorted. “That’s Sammy’s version of chicken soup. Cure for everything and anything. It’s frikkin’ annoying, especially because the goddamn shit works.”

Bobby forced a laugh. “Yeah, well, so does this.” He waved the empty bottle of whiskey.

 

\---##---

 

 “You did good.” Sam was saying as he crouched down in front of him where he sat, his large hands on Bobby’s knees. “You did great.”

Bobby shook his head and set the mug of tea to the side, where it rested precariously on the couch cushion. He leaned back into the couch, his legs falling open, and scrubbed his face with his hand. “I’m never gonna see Ma or Jacky again,” he said.

Sam leaned forward into the space between Bobby’s legs, hazel eyes sad but warm. “No, not in this life. But Bobby, you saved them. You _saved_ Jacky’s soul.” Bobby stared at him. “Trust me on this,” Sam said. “It’s the best thing you have ever, _ever_ done.” And then Sam leaned forward, and kissed him.

Bobby let it happen. He’d been doing nothing but falling for the past six months. Sam felt like solid ground.

 

The next morning, Bobby called Angel and Jeremiah while Sam set the room back to rights-- putting back the rug and the coffee table, moving the chairs back and putting the pictures back up on the wall. He even flipped over the couch cushion that was stained with spilled tea, giving Bobby a half grin when he did so. “Angel,” Bobby was saying on the phone, “get your black ass back here and bring Loco Ono. Jerry’s on his way with Camille.”

…  
  
“No man, I called the fuckin number. I’ve got a guy here who’s gonna ‘cleanse’ the house, whatever the fuck that means. He wants everyone here who lives in the house.”

…

“How the fuck should I know? You wanted me to call, so I called. So you can fucking do what he wants.”

Bobby hung up the phone and grinned at Sam, who was shaking his head and smiling while fiddled with some stuff he’d laid out on the dining room table. “They’ll all be here in thirty,” he said.

“The way you sweet talk each other makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside,” said Sam.

“Fuck you.” Bobby strolled over to the table, stared at the stuff spread out everywhere. “What the hell is all this shit?”

“Sage, angelica root, some other stuff,” answered Sam. We need to make bags and put them in the walls of the house--north, south, east and west on every floor.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because houses that have been haunted are like motels with ‘no vacancy’ signs -- another spirit could come along to take the place of the one that has left. This will keep that from happening.”

Bobby took his word for it. “Why does everyone have to be here?”

“They don’t,” Sam said, tying off a bundle like he’d aced all his arts and crafts classes. “But I thought it would help them to see a ritual performed. Women like stuff like that.”

It turned out Sam was right. When Jerry and Camille, Angel and Sophie all got to the house, Sam turned the puppy dog look and the dimples on the women and had them fawning and clucking in seconds. Bobby shook his head in amusement, watching as Sam, harnessing the awesome power of badgering women, sent Angel and Jerry to different parts of the house to stuff little bags of herbs in the walls. “The easiest thing to do is take out a wall outlet and shove them behind it,” said Sam, “that way you aren’t knocking holes in the walls.”  Sophie and Camille dragged their grumbling men upstairs and Bobby laughed out loud. “You really are a manipulative bitch,” he said. Sam just winked and grabbed a screwdriver, intent on doing the first floor.

Afterwards they all congregated in the living room while Sam muttered some Latin mumbo jumbo. “All done,” he said smiling. And Bobby thought it was true that the house felt better. He could have been biased, but he could see Camille and Sophie thought the same thing.  Sophie looked at Sam like he had hung the moon. It became her mission in life to convince him to stay for dinner.

“Bobby, you sure about this guy?” asked Jerry in a low voice. Bobby nodded. “He’s cool, man.”

But Angel was a little less willing to take it all on faith. For one thing, he wasn’t too happy about the way La Vida Loca was paying attention to Sam, and when she put her hand on his arm, entreating him to stay, Angel looked like he was ready to make something of it. “Leave it alone, man” said Bobby. “Sam’s not interested.”

Angel looked at him and Bobby met his gaze levelly. Angel whistled. “You work fast, Bobby.” Jerry raised his eyebrows, but Bobby just shrugged. “It wasn’t like that, he said.

“Uh huh,” said Angel. “You know, there’s a story going ‘round about why Hector Morales ain’t been around for a few days.” he looked over at Sam, who was telling Sophie that he liked to add a little cinnamon when he made spaghetti sauce, for fuck’s sake. Sophie was looking like he’d told her the meaning of life.  “Don’t worry about it,” said Bobby. “Hector was a moron who would have got his ass kicked sooner or later.”

“Cops are looking for Sam,” said Angel.

“He’ll be gone before morning,” said Bobby, certain of it.

“And what about you, man?” asked Jerry. “You’ve got that look.”

Bobby was silent for a bit. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I’m gonna hit the road. It’s time.”

Angel looked disappointed and Jerry said, “The girls are going to miss you, Bobby.” But Bobby felt the rightness of the decision settle in him and stepped close to give his brothers each a one-armed hug. “It’s different,” he said to them. “I’m leaving, but I’m not running. I’ll stay in touch.” Angel gave him a long look and then smiled. Jerry nodded. “Okay then,” he said. And just like that the Mercer brothers were all back on the same page.

Sam stayed for dinner. Sophie could have worn down the Dalai Lama and Sam seemed to know how to pick his battles, so he gave in gracefully, if slightly reluctantly. He then spent the next couple hours dodging personal questions by telling funny stories about a shape-shifter who was hung up on old Hollywood horror flicks and would go around pretending he was Dracula or the Mummy, and how he almost got himself killed by some kind of Japanese monster you could only see when you were drunk off your ass. The girls screamed with laughter. Angel and Jerry both looked like they thought it was all total bullshit, and Bobby thought it probably wasn’t but concentrated on wolfing down his food and thinking where he’d go when he took off.  After dinner Jerry turned on the game, but Bobby wasn’t in the mood to yell at a television screen. Sam found him a little while later sitting on the front porch steps, staring at his beer.

“You okay?” he asked, settling his long frame down next to Bobby’s short one on the step. “Yeah,” said Bobby. “I’m good.” It was true. Bobby hadn’t felt this sense of peace for months, not since Evelyn Mercer had sat on these same steps before Christmas, knitting something no one would ever wear and telling Bobby to stick around.

“You going to stick around?” Add mind-reading to Sam’s list of freaky talents.

“No,” said Bobby. “I’m gone come morning.” He waved his beer bottle out towards the street, and presumably the world beyond. “Turns out, there’s a lot more out there than I knew about. I think I’m gonna go take a look.”

“Monster hunting?”

Bobby smiled and shrugged. “Ma always told me to find a career.”

Sam nodded. “You want to come along with me for awhile?” he asked, looking out towards the same invisible horizon. “I could show you the ropes, introduce you to some people.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby, “I’d like that.”


	24. Big Brothers

A burst of noise from the jarheads clustered around the pool table made Bobby pause in his story. The barmaid was scuttling away from them, looking unhappy. That’s going to be trouble, Bobby thought, playing with his empty glass. Dean was looking over at the crowd and from the expression on his face, thinking the same thing.

“Anyway,” Bobby finished up, “that’s the story of how I met Sam.”

“So you got into the business,” said Dean. “You regretting it yet?”

“Are you shitting me? I get to beat on evil sons of bitches with crowbars until they’re bloody pulp. I can shoot them on sight, take their limbs off with a machete, set them _on_ _fire_ and burn their fucking castles to the ground and I’m just doing the world a favor. I don’t need to worry about a job, I can hustle pool  and poker, or cheat rich bastards out of money with faked credit cards, impersonate cops and feds and laugh in the faces of local cops - which is sweet, by the way - and I never have to pass through the same town twice. All in the name of fighting the good fight. Man, this job was made for me.” Bobby grinned. “The research is a bitch though,” he added. “That Latin crap kicks my ass every time.”

Dean grimaced. “Yeah, I usually left as much of that as I could to Sam.”

“Yeah, well Sam is some kind of freak genius for that shit,” Bobby said. “Do you know I once saw him trap a demon inside its meat suit by saying a whole exorcism backwards? It was wild.”

Dean’s look sharpened. “Yeah, I’ve seen him do that. It’s near the top of the list of his stupid pet tricks.” He looked at Bobby intently. “Demon, huh? How long did you two hunt together?”

Bobby didn’t react to Dean’s change of tone. “About three months,” he said. “Just long enough to get me started. Our last job was the demon, then we went our separate ways. He decided to hang it up.”

“Got himself a nice girl and a dog,” said Dean, feeling disappointed and bitter. The answers he was looking for didn’t seem like they were coming.

But Bobby just looked at him, assessing. “That last job with the demon,” he said, “Sam almost killed the girl it was possessing. He wouldn’t let the demon escape--kept asking it where you were.”

Dean looked up at that.

“She was a fifteen year old girl whose BFF was playing around with the wrong kind of black magic,” Bobby went on. “She got taken, and the fucking demon spent the next two weeks letting her get gang-banged at truck stops. Made sure she felt every bit of it. By the time we came along she was looking pretty worse for the wear, you know?” Dean’s eyes slid away from Bobby’s towards the activity in the bar.

“So Sam and I trap the demon, and I’m ready to get the thing out of her, but Sam won’t let me. He starts in on it - Where’s Dean? Who’s got him? Is he in Hell? Does Crowley have him? - he keeps at it for hours, man. Brings out the holy water and the silver knives. But either the thing doesn’t know, or it’s having too much fun watching Sam torture a teenage girl - which he’s fucking good at, just so you know. I finally had to clock him so I could exorcise the thing and get the girl somewhere safe. When I got back Sam was sitting on the floor where I’d left him, retching his guts out. He told me right then he was quitting the life.” Bobby stared at Dean. “I thought it was a good call.”

“I could have used some of that attitude backing me up when I was stuck in fucking Purgatory,” Dean said, the ever-present coil of anger and bitterness not letting him back off.

“Don’t be an asshole.”

Dean looked up at Bobby’s eyes. They were hard and unforgiving. And unimpressed with  Dean’s self-pity. “The only time Sam went all psycho,” Bobby said, “was when he was after anything that had to do with you. So the way I see it, two things could have happened. He could have found a way to get you out, but you wouldn’t recognized him when you got back topside. He’d have ended up on the FBI most wanted again, only this time he would have deserved to be there.” Dean didn’t say anything.

“Or,” Bobby went on, “he could have figured it out, made a deal with the wrong kind of monster, and ended up in no man’s land with you.”

“I’ll take door number two, Pat.” said Dean sardonically.

“Come on, man,” Bobby exploded. “Sam’s your brother! Your _little_ _brother_.”  He leaned right into Dean’s face, “I had a little brother, and he’s dead now because I had to drag him into my shit. You want to know how Jacky died? He wasn’t just shot. A punk unloaded a shot gun into his chest and into his gut. He was laid out in the snow begging for me to help him, drowning in his own blood, his guts perforated, his jeans full of his own shit and soaked in his own piss. And I’m stuck twenty feet away pinned down by a fucking machine gun not able to do a god damn _fucking_ _thing_ except listen to him die screaming - screaming for _me_.” Bobby wiped at his eyes roughly. “I would give anything,” he said, “ _anything_ , to turn back the clock and change things. I would have left Jacky right out of it. Put his pansy ass back on a plane to California after the funeral so he could waste his life getting blow jobs from underage groupies. But no, I had to be Mr. Fuckin’ Badass, and drag Cracker Jack along for the ride. I was his big brother, man, I was supposed to be watching out for him. I _know_ you get that. Would you really have wanted to drag Sam down with you into fucking Purgatory?”

Somewhere deep in Dean’s gut he knew Bobby was right. But the knowledge was buried under a year’s worth of “fight or fight”  -  the only setting you could have if you wanted to survive in a place where fight or die was all there was. Where your whole world narrowed down to what was in front of you that needed killing, and who was watching your back.  Six months out and it was still Dean’s default setting - fight or fight. He didn’t know what to do with the idea that Sam had found another way to survive and it made him want to hurl things.

A crash across the room let him know that he wasn’t the only one in the bar in the mood to throw shit around.

Dean and Bobby both looked over at the now very drunk and well on their way to belligerent jarheads. One of them had grabbed the barmaid, who was trying to extricate herself without dropping her tray.  One glass had already hit the floor.  
“You dropped my beer, sweetheart” said moron number one, “make it up to me.”

“Let me go,” said the girl, sounding upset and a little frightened.

“Hell,” said Bobby, pushing himself up out of his seat.

“Good,” said Dean, following, “I need to smash someone’s face in.”

It wasn’t a fair fight. There were only six of them. Bobby was the kind of fighter who didn’t know how to back down, and Dean, well, he fought like the word “mercy” had never even made it to the dictionary. It was a slaughter. The only reason they weren’t arrested for aggravated assault was because the guy behind the bar dug out a shotgun and ordered all the jarheads out, threatening to call the cops and - worse - their C.O. He stood at the door, shotgun ready, until the last of them pulled out of the parking lot, then closed the doors and locked them. The girl, whose name turned out to be Francie, also turned out not to be moonlighting as a stripper. She was a single mom putting herself through school taking adult ed classes at the local community college. Bobby fished out all the money he had with his left hand--his right one currently swollen and numb under a dishcloth filled with ice. He dumped the cash on the girl’s tray saying “Thanks for taking care of us this evening, honey.” Dean, who didn’t have a scratch on him, the bastard, did the same. Between the two of them, Francie ended up with about 1100 bucks--which didn’t make up for the groping she’d had to endure all night, but came really damn close. She looked like she wanted to kiss them both, but was too scared to try it, so she settled for a wobbly “Thank you, _so_ much.” The bartender, though, asked if they wanted jobs as bouncers. “You can drink free,” he added, which only underscored his desperate need to hire some crowd control. “Get yourself an off duty cop,” Dean told him, “and make sure he’s got a gun.”

The fight had cleared Dean’s head, and the adrenalin had metabolized all the alcohol he and Bobby had determinedly worked their way through during the evening. He’d been wanting to punch some asshole’s face for days now and since he couldn’t exactly beat down on himself, the bar fight had been a good substitute. The two of them strode out into the parking lot companionably side by side, whatever issues that had been simmering between them over the care and feeding of Sam Winchester now set aside.

“Thanks,” said Dean as they came up alongside the Impala. “And thanks for looking out for Sam while I wasn’t around. I owe you for that.”

Bobby shrugged. “We looked out for each other,” he said, “at least for awhile.”

“Are you guys still…” Dean waived a hand around vaguely.

“Not since Sam hit a dog with his car.”

Dean nodded, and searched around in his head for a way to ask something he wasn’t sure how to put into words. Is Sam okay? Does he still love Amelia? Does he still want to hunt? Does he still want to be brothers?

But Bobby beat him to it. “You know you’re the most important person in Sam’s life,” he said, “right? I mean, you do get that? Girl or no girl, it’s still all about you with him.”

“Yeah, well maybe it was once,” said Dean “but maybe not so much now.”

“Bullshit,” Bobby sounded absolutely positive. “you know, I called him up because I needed help pronouncing some Latin shit in this spell I’ve got to use to break a curse on a set of golf clubs, of all the stupid shit. Things don’t let you play under par, and then beat you to death when you lose. Some worthless piece of shit’s revenge for losing a tournament. Anyway, Sam could have told me how to say all that gibberish over the phone. But he wanted me to come here. He wanted you and me to meet. When I left him earlier, he told me I’d be followed, and he told me to say whatever I wanted to you. Basically gave me permission to lay it all out for you. ‘He’s my brother, Bobby’ he says, ‘you could really help me out.’ With the fucking puppy eyes.”

Dean shook his head, a feeling of fondness rising up in him almost in spite of himself. “Christ, he’s one manipulative bitch,” he said.

“Heavy weight world champ,” Bobby agreed. “He wants his brother back, man. He’ll do pretty much anything to get back in your good graces.” Bobby paused, looked at the Impala gleaming in the moonlit night. “Don’t make him prove it to you, because he will or die trying.”

Dean flinched a bit, and nodded. “Appreciate the advice,” he said. “I’m listening.” He shook Bobby Mercer’s hand and they each got in their cars and drove off into the night in opposite directions.


	25. Little Brothers

Dean didn’t go back to Sam’s motel. He texted his brother, and then set a course for Rufus’s cabin, taking the opportunity to drive through the night when the roads were empty of everything but his Baby and the beckoning trail of moonlight ahead. He wanted the time to think, and it would take him at least two days to get to the cabin.

The truth was, Bobby Mercer’s story had shook Dean a bit. A lot of it, he knew, came down to how similar the Mercer brothers were to him and Sam. Isolated, outsiders, fiercely loyal to each other, driven by revenge, used to violence and all too familiar with the worst side of the human race.  The people Sam and Dean met and helped didn’t think about that much, Dean knew. They were grateful to be free of the ghost or the poltergeist, or the demon that had twisted their life into something they never wanted it to be. They were relieved it was _over_.

It was never over for the Winchesters. Sam and Dean had grown up doing triage on other people’s fucked-upedness. Ghosts occur because of violent deaths, so almost every case was a lesson in the shit people do to each other. Little Sammy had been the family researcher. At an age when the most violence kids saw happened in their video games, Sammy already knew all there was to know about why people commit suicide, and all the ways to get it done.  When his schoolmates were talking about killing each other out on the field at the next game, Dean was already up close and personally familiar with most of the ways and reasons people murdered each other. It’s one of the reasons he never went out for any sports. Not only were he and Sam rarely in one town long enough to finish a semester much less a football season, but Dean was pounded on and did enough pounding of his own in real life, thank you very much. 

Each of the Winchesters had their own way of coping with the relentless horror and hopelessness of it all. John Winchester drank, seriously and with single-minded determination, and spent long hours plotting revenge against the thing that had killed his wife. Dean fucked anything willing, and told himself he was like a special ops solider on a classified mission that saved innocent people. Sam Winchester read books and dreamed about a different life away from all the gore.

Huh. Thinking about it, it’s possible that Sammy’s had been the healthiest response to the kind of life they’d lived.

So Dean got it - the way Sam had latched on to the Mercer case - he did. Sam’s family was broken, how could he resist a shot at fixing one just like it? And Dean recognized enough of himself in Bobby Mercer to understand why Sam would be drawn to the other man, and want to keep him around for awhile. He was on board with the whole Mercer “It’s us vs. them” approach to life. Dean’s thoughts drifted to Benny and he shifted uncomfortably. As substitute brothers went, once again Sam’s solution had points over Dean’s. Sam found a reflection of the brother he missed. Dean found someone to be…what? The brother he wished he had? He wondered what his Dad would have said. He wondered what Bobby - their Bobby - would have said.

Actually, no, he didn’t. _Idjit._

He could hear Bobby’s voice so clearly in his mind that his hand automatically went to his breast pocket to touch the flask. But of course, the pocket was empty.

As the sky lightened to the east, Dean found a truck stop with a few cabins in the back and a diner that was already busy with the earliest of the early morning haulers. Dean took a seat at the end of the counter - not liking to sit with his back to the door, but also not quite up for sitting in a booth that didn’t have a little brother sitting across from him bitching about the lack of low-cal options on the menu. He ordered the pancake special, with extra bacon, and drank down his cup of - surprisingly good - black coffee. He checked his phone, but there were no messages. “Going to the cabin,” he’d messaged Sam. “Bobby’s cool.”  As olive branches went it was really more of a twig with a couple of leaves on it, but Dean didn’t think Sam would have listened to anything more emphatic, given how they’d left things. Besides, if he knew his little brother, Sam was busy trying to close the can of worms Dean had opened up for him when he sent him back to Texas in the first place. Sam wouldn’t be  back in touch until he’d fixed things with Amelia, one way or another. That was one thing about his little brother. When you had his attention, you had it one hundred percent. Sam never blew anybody off. The best Dean could do is let Sam know where he’d be. That was practically “Wish you were here” in Winchester speak.

Instead of making him sleepy, breakfast has re-energized him, so Dean got the waitress to put a slice of apple pie in a box for him to eat on the road (remembering at the last minute he’d dumped all his cash on Francie-not-a-stripper’s tray, so thank god for credit card fraud), and gassed up his Baby, ready to get another full day’s worth of driving in. As he set the pie on the passenger seat and put the key in the ignition, his phone buzzed. Dean fished it out to take a look.

“Okay.” 

It was Sam, finally replying to his text. Then a second message came through.

“Thanks for not getting into a fight….”

Dean frowned, because he had got into a fight last night and how had Sam found out?  And why did he have the only little brother on the planet who texted in grammatically correct sentences anyway? The phone buzzed again.

“…with Bobby. J”

Dean laughed, feeling hope not just bubble up inside his chest but actually spread out and settle in. He texted Sam back.

“Bitch.”

And got an immediate response.

“Jerk.”

Dean smiled, the weight of worry that had been pressing on him suddenly lifting away. Sure there was stuff to work through, but he and Sam would be okay. He started up the car and pulled out onto the road, determined to make Montana by the next day. The sun was shining, he had a full tank of gas, and the car smelled like apple pie. He and Sammy were talking. In Dean’s world that was as good as it could get.

And a week later when the two of them were standing in front of each other in Rufus’s cabin, wondering what the fuck had really gone down in their attempt to rescue Alfie-the-Angel, Dean was able to look Sam in the eye and make a real apology for the stunt he’d pulled that had sent Sam running back to Amelia. He was even able to say he understood why Sam had done what he’d done while Dean was fighting it out in Hell’s suburb; say it, and mean it. Because ultimately Bobby Mercer had been right about that. Big brothers were supposed to watch out for their little brothers and keep them safe, not drag them into the shit. So if Sam had found “safe” then Dean wasn’t going to get in the way of that, and he said as much while they were standing there trying to figure out “what’s next?”

And Sam, listened. He listened, and then he chose. The one thing Dean had forgot while he was stewing over whether Sam still wanted to be family was that little brothers always followed their big brothers around, _everywhere_. A life with a girl and a dog and house, or sitting on a threadbare couch with his brother watching a game and eating chili from a can? It really was no contest.

 

The End.


End file.
